Solving the design equation: Major laboratory trends of this decade By Richard R. Rietz The generation of laboratories being built in the U.S. in this decade, and the features they contain, are dictated by a series of major technical, economic, and scientific trends. Limited capital = cost-conscious buildings Overall, there is less funding for research buildings now than in the late 1990s. The recent recession has meant less tax revenue for public capital projects in the first half of this decade, but the situation is improving as state revenues grow with the recovery. Companies, however, are keeping earnings up by embracing fewer large capital projects, particularly laboratories that show no obvious return on investment. Interdisciplinary spaces: Researchers at California Institute of Technology’s Broad Center in Pasadena enjoy a combined library, reading room, kitchen, and informal meeting area. One “family room” is provided for each floor. These communal areas double as circulation space between the labs. Design: Pei Cobb Freed/SmithGroup. Photo: Timothy Hursley. Click to enlarge. The pharmaceutical industry has stopped building mega-labs and, in some cases, is reducing its R&D workforce. New federal funds are being redirected toward biodefense and homeland security, and chargeback rates for federal research grants have drawn more scrutiny. Luckily, in these latter cases, we have seen some investment in laboratory space. The bottom line: Capital approval for a lab, public or private, is now harder to obtain. Consequently, lab projects have become a lot more selective and increasingly cost-conscious. But cost-effective strategies are being worked in. Just-right-sized mechanical systems are now being designed, reducing HVAC requirements. Electrical loads created by user equipment are also being challenged, and “old fashioned” features such as operable windows in office zones and recirculation of lab air for local cooling are back in vogue. Interdisciplinary science = new projects Interdisciplinary labs house university researchers whose work does not easily fall within any traditional department. Many of these individuals work between the boundaries of medicine, physics, chemistry, biology, engineering, mathematics, and computational science. As such, the labs for these researchers often do not fit in a building designed for a “pure” discipline, prompting many universities to build separate labs to house transdisciplinary science. A few examples of this widespread trend include the Duke Univ. Center for Interdisciplinary Engineering, Durham, N.C.; the Baylor Sciences Building at Baylor Univ., Waco, Texas; and the Univ. of Michigan Life Sciences Institute, Ann Arbor. Such buildings are incorporating features designed to keep the exchange of ideas between these varied-interest researchers flowing. Library rooms merged with a break room merged with a private group library are being offered, along with community spaces such as multi-ethnic food courts, collision areas, huddle rooms, and group discussion areas. These efforts are being pushed along by the National Institutes of Health’s “Roadmap for Science,” which aims to fund more interdisciplinary science. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute is also funding more team research that will scientifically “bless” and accelerate this type of work. Kit of parts: The lab furniture at Stanford Univ.’s Clark Center, Stanford, Calif., consists of movable tables, shelves, tops, and carts. The piped utilities and electrical services can also be repositioned by using a series of hooks and rails attached to the underside of the ceiling. The yellow supports indicate that this bench is reserved for a non-group collaborator that is working in the lab. Design: Foster & Partners/MBT Architecture. Photo: Richard Rietz. Click to enlarge. Lab furniture = kit of parts The high cost and time delays required to reconfigure fixed lab furniture are no longer acceptable. Many labs are turning to a set of pieces (kit) that users can chose from to make their own labs. As much as possible, users can assemble the pieces themselves. Consequently, the pieces have gotten simpler (tables, carts, shelves). On the flip side, utilities are less frequently built-in and more often hung from the ceiling on hooks, rails, or cableways. Flexibility and adaptability are still very important. A lab may have all the furniture for wet bench work, just the overhead utilities if equipment carts are underneath, or no furniture if large equipment is installed. A key requirement in many new labs is the ability to easily and economically rearrange furniture and in-lab utility systems to create all these configurations. Given that many of the labs might not need a full complement of pieces, some owners are only purchasing two-thirds or three-quarters of the furniture that would be needed to fill the entire lab space. Shared buildings = open labs, LERs, and core resources A growing number of research buildings are being shared by two or more independent organizations. Completed in 2003, the Queensland Biosciences Precinct (QBP), St. Lucia, Australia—at over 375,000 ft2, the largest shared lab building—houses one university institute plus five government lab groups. Individually, they would not have been able to afford new buildings, but together they assembled the funding for a very large project. Large, open laboratories are used so that benches can be easily reassigned without moving walls, with a typical lab featuring between 20 to 24 bays of benches. The advantage of this approach is that there are no lab sizes to administer; benches are simply reassigned as groups grow or shrink. Most of these labs sport glass walls to promote team awareness and give more visibility for safety. Shared buildings: 750 researchers of the Univ. of Queensland, St. Lucia, Australia, and the federal Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation share the Queensland Biosciences Precinct. The separate lab wings (right and left) are joined by a common wing for conferencing, administration, core laboratories, stock rooms, and support services. The government and university groups have separate reporting and administrative structures. Design and photo: Jackson Architecture. Click to enlarge. Shared linear equipment rooms (LERs) are used to optimize space utilization and raise the efficiency of the lab floorplate. These spaces are actually very wide (12 to 14 ft) rooms, often extending the length of the lab block. They serve the dual purposes of circulation and housing large non-technical equipment (freezers, refrigerators, centrifuges, supplies). They work best in bioscience labs with high amounts of equipment that must be close to the lab. Core resources (animal housing, electron microscopy, NMR tools, greenhouses, central stores, sequencing, parallel computing, BSL-3) are shared and often operate on a chargeback basis. Interestingly, several state governments are now funding large shared lab buildings in the hope they will house not only university institutes but also start-up biotech and bio-medical device companies. The Arizona Biodesign Institute, Tempe, and Scripps-Florida, Jupiter, are the largest of these projects. Both states are spending nearly $500 million each to fund these projects in the hope of nurturing a local bioscience industry. New technologies = new lab types Two new lab types have expanded greatly: nanotechnology and biodefense. New engineering labs often contain nanotechnology fabrication areas, characterization suites of electron microscopes, adaptable labs for substrate preparation, and device assembly and device testing areas. The fabrication areas are like those found in the semiconductor industry, while the characterization suites have very stringent controls for vibration, noise, and electromagnetic interference. Shared buildings: Arizona has funded the Arizona State Univ. Biodesign Institute buildings in Tempe, hoping to create and nurture a biotechnology and biomedical device industry in the state. This first wing was completed in late 2004 and occupied in early 2005. Wing 2 is now nearing completion. While Wings 1 and 2 are for university research groups, Wings 3 and 4 are intended as incubator labs and/or leased space to pre-IPO, university-fostered bio-startups. Design: Lord, Aeck & Sargent/Gould Evans. Photo: © Mark Bosclair. Click to enlarge. Major new nanotechnology buildings have recently been completed at multiple universities, including Purdue, Cornell, Northwestern, and the Univ. of Alberta, with large projects at Harvard and Trinity College (Dublin) not far behind. The federal Dept. of Energy has also funded 486,000 ft2 of nanotechnology space at six federal laboratories that will be brought on line between 2006 and 2010. Almost all of these labs employ a “bay and chase” design for the fabrication space. President Bush recently signed an extension of the National Nanotechnology Initiative (started under the Clinton administration) that funds the operation of and research at these facilities. Biodefense is the second type of intense lab construction. The NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) is currently funding BSL-4 labs at Ft. Detrick, Md., and at Rocky Mountain Laboratories, Hamilton, Mont., as well as the BSL-4 National Biodefense Labs at Boston Univ., Cambridge, Mass., and Univ. of Texas at Galveston. Contracts for construction of nine BSL-3 Regional Biodefense Labs have also been awarded. Federal funding in this field has increased over 800-fold in five years. In addition, many states are building their own BSL-3 response facilities, or adding containment facilities to existing lab buildings, including public health facilities. Nanotech and biodefense lab facilities both have “embedded high- performance subspaces.” These are labs or rooms that either house expensive equipment (e.g. ultra high-resolution electron microscopes) requiring extreme vibration, EMI, and temperature control, or allow workers to manipulate dangerous organisms or substances. In both cases, the building design is focused on making these special spaces work perfectly and without failures. Most research in physics and engineering requires custom-built equipment, and as more research utilizes these atomic-scale tools, the need for lab spaces with high performance environments will continue. The design conundrum We are asking our new lab buildings to yield higher performance spaces and greater adaptability—but at a lower first cost and reduced operating expenses. The challenge to owners, planners, and designers has never been greater. Richard R. Rietz (rrrietz@earthlink.net) is an analytical-inorganic chemist who has been writing and speaking about lab buildings for the past 25 years. He currently consults for organizations planning new or renovated lab buildings (see www.laboratorystrategicplanning.com). A different version of this article was previously published in R&D Magazine.