Campus project designed
to inspire ground-breaking science
The Project: Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Janelia Farm Research Campus, Ashburn, Va. Multiple-building campus including 610,000-ft2 “landscape building” (research lab); 80,000-ft2#, 96-room conference housing building; and 53 apartment housing units totaling 75,000-ft2 on rural 281-acre site. Includes 95,000-ft2, 300-space underground parking garage. ~$430 million including site work, fees, furnishings, and built-in equipment.
This project was named Laboratory of the Year in the 2007 Lab of the Year competition for its overall excellence.
The undulating buildings of the Janelia Farm research campus are set into the existing wooded landscape, preserving the character of the site. Photo: Paul Fetters. Click to enlarge
Terracing in the design of the landscape building (research lab) and the alternating placement of the office “pods” maximize daylighting and views. The office pods on the second and third levels are interspersed with rooftop gardens. Photo: Paul Fetters. Click to enlarge.
The Team: Rafael Viñoly Architects, New York City (lead architecture firm); The Mark Winkler Co./Duke Realty, Alexandria, Va. (owner’s representative); Jacobs Facilities Inc., Ashburn, Va. (project management); Kirksey Architecture, Houston, Texas (consulting architect, public spaces); Research Facilities Design, San Diego (lab consultant); Burt Hill, Washington, D.C. (MEP/fire protection engineering); Flack & Kurtz, New York City (MEP engineering for conference housing and housing village); Dewberry & Davis, Leesburg, Va. (civil engineering); Thornton Tomasetti Engineers, Newark, N.J. (structural engineering); Paula Hayes Studio, New York City (landscape architecture); Cline Bettridge Bernstein Lighting Design Inc., New York City (lighting design); Shen Milsom & Wilke Inc., New York City (acoustical, vibration, telecom/ data, security, and AV consultant); Hughes Associates Inc., Las Vegas (code consultant); Turner Construction Co., Arlington, Va. (general contractor).
The site was already partially developed with existing office buildings and surface parking (lower left). The landmark “manor house” (center) has been preserved. Future housing is planned for the northeastern quadrant. Plan: Rafael Viñoly Architects.Click to enlarge.
The Users: The Howard Hughes Medical Institute, an independent medical research organization, employs ~320 investigators and 2,500 research associates, technicians, and other personnel, as well as an administrative staff. Investigators work in institute labs and also serve as faculty at 70 host institutions.
The investigators serve renewable five-year terms at HHMI, working on collaborative projects without constraints that may be imposed by other types of institutions in the academic and private sectors. All funding is provided by HHMI, again avoiding restrictions that may be inherent in other funding sources. Research project proposals are evaluated on the basis of originality, creativity, and degree of scientific risk-taking.
At final build-out in 2009, the Janelia campus is intended to support the work of ~40 lab heads at any given time, as well as ~24 group leaders (heading teams of two to six people) and 20 independent Janelia fellows (each with up to two associates). The campus will also house ~250 permanent research and support staff and ~100 itinerant scientists (such as faculty on sabbatical and visiting collaborators). The primary administrative organization remains at the HHMI headquarters in Chevy Chase, Md.
The ground level (top) of the landscape building consists of public, lab, and mechanical support. The second and third levels feature office and lab space, with extra lab support on the second floor and a large parking garage under the “green” roof on the third. Plan: Rafael Viñoly Architects.Click to enlarge.
The Schedule: Site search for a new purpose-built campus began in 2000; master planning began in 2002; construction commenced in 2003; occupancy began in early 2006.
The Goals: HHMI’s overriding goal was to create a new kind of biomedical science community where collaboration and flexibility would be supported by the entire site. Proximity to the existing headquarters, as well as transportation, housing, good schools, and residential services that would aid in recruitment, led to the purchase of the Janelia Farm site: a wooded parcel sloping from an existing 1936 farmhouse down to the Potomac River. The property contained three nearly completed office buildings that were part of a planned tech park being developed by a previous owner. Some infrastructure was already in place, including road access, zoning approvals for R&D buildings, and surface parking. One of the existing office buildings was used as a project office for the architects, project manager, and contractor during campus design and construction.
Daylight penetrates deep into the open labs from the glazed and skylit corridor that runs between the lab blocks and the office pods. Photo: Jeff Goldberg.Click to enlarge.
Benches are prepiped and prewired and connect with floor-level service bollards, allowing easy reconfiguration or removal of bench units. Photo: Jeff Goldberg.Click to enlarge.
The client selected Rafael Viñoly Architects following a successful proposal in a design competition. The competition was based on an extensive program written by institute architect Robert McGhee. Key goals of that document included:
• Creation of a science facility that would support basic biomedical research projects that might be difficult to approach in other types of institutions, due to the need for expertise from disparate areas; the long-term nature of the work; or the fact that they are outside the current priorities of other types of funding agencies. The facility is intended to support project-oriented teams who work together for periods ranging from a few weeks to several years.
• Creation of short-term housing for conference attendees.
• Creation of longer-term housing for visiting scientists working at the campus, including some family housing.
• Provision of services and amenities to enhance the campus experience and foster the sense of community, including child care, dining, fitness, and social amenities.
• Preservation of long-term building and site usefulness through adaptability.
• Respect for the character of the existing site, including preservation of views, and sustainability of design strategies.
Detail of the interface between office pods, gardens, labs, support, and corridor zones. The office pod entries are wide and open, breaking up the long expanses of hallway. Plan: Rafael Viñoly Architects. Click to enlarge.
The Solutions: The architects proposed creating two primary structures: an undulating, three-story research facility with two lab floors on top and a meeting, research, and service floor below, facing a two-story conference facility across a man-made pond and entry plaza. A housing village lies just east of the conference housing, with future apartment space planned even farther to the east.
The organization of the 900-ft-long lab, or “landscape building,” is unusual and complex. A pair of open, skylit stairs trisects the facility, providing connections among all three floors as well as easy access to the parking garage. The building steps up to a sloping grade in terraces, with office “pods” and rooftop gardens alternating toward the front of the facility (north side), labs and dedicated support at the center of the floorplate (accessed by glazed and skylit corridors that run behind the office pods and rooftop gardens); and a mechanical and support zone behind the labs.
The conference housing facility includes 96 hotel-style rooms for short-term visitors to the site. Photo: Paul Warchol. Click to enlarge.
The main floor, with the greatest available depth at 270 ft, includes a variety of public spaces, including multiple conference rooms, a 250-seat auditorium, a 100-seat auditorium, prefunction space, administrative offices, a fitness center, a cafeteria, and a rathskeller (pub). The middle “band” of this floor includes some research space (particularly for work that is vibration-sensitive or involves very large instrumentation, such as NMRs). A rear support/ service corridor separates this zone from a large mechanical zone and loading dock at the rear.
The second story includes freestanding office pods alternating with roof gardens at the front; a primary circulation corridor that is glazed and skylit; open labs and dedicated lab support zones in the center; a support/service corridor; and core labs and mechanical space in the rear. The third floor has a band of office pods/gardens (which sit atop lab space below, due to the terraced stacking); a band of labs and dedicated lab support; and the parking garage atop the second-story core labs and mechanical rooms at the rear.
The garage is covered by a vegetated, 180,000-ft2 “green roof” that helps the entire building function as an integral part of the landscape. It is the second-largest such roof in the U.S., ranking only behind the 10.4-acre installation at Ford Motors’ River Rouge plant in Dearborn, Mich.
Exterior doors in the office pods provide easy access to the rooftop gardens. Photo: Paul Warchol. Click to enlarge.
Each office pod is roughly square, consisting of three offices at both the east and west sides, a north-facing conference room, and a central open office zone. The space in the pods can be configured for multiple different team arrangements. Wide, open entries to each office pod punctuate the glazed circulation corridors, breaking up the long expanses. Office pods are across the corridor from associated lab suites, which are entered through pantry or copy/mail spaces.
The lab zones are column-free and are primarily eight modules wide with removable benchwork systems at the center and fixed sinks and fume hoods on the inside wall. The island lab benches are flexible and removable, consisting of prewired and prepiped tables over movable cabinet units. Service functions are accessible via connections from floor-mounted bollards, including vacuum, gas, electricity, and data connections.
The support zone behind the open lab spaces, across a ghost corridor, is 22 ft deep and accommodates a wide array of equipment. The blocks of support space are about 50 ft long and are separated by cross-corridors that give access to the 15-ft-wide service/support and equipment corridor behind the in-lab support zone.
Set deeper into the hillside on the first and second stories are additional support zones, including a second-floor vivarium with holding and procedure rooms, and a broad variety of specialty labs (physiology, optics, robotics, microscopy, and fly storage and behavior rooms). The east end of the third floor includes the site’s day care center.
The hotel-like conference housing offers pleasant views of woods and water due to its proximity to man-made ponds. The curved facility consists of a single-loaded long corridor of rooms on both floors, and is connected with the research building by a tunnel for convenient access. A central gathering space and fireplace on the main floor offers a pleasant spot for relaxing and social interaction without having to travel to the landscape building.
The Highlights: Because of HHMI’s unique organization and mission, conference and meeting facilities are a particularly crucial aspect of the design. The rural location required a comprehensive approach to planning, encompassing amenities that would serve the needs of long-term staff, short-term investigators, and transient visitors.
The main floor of the landscape building, for instance, has not only the expected auditorium and conference rooms but also multiple social spaces, including a home theater, games area, “living room,” science meeting room, and rathskeller (which serves food in the evenings even when the cafeteria is not operating). Dining facilities can seat more than 250 if needed for large meetings. A library and computer center make it easy for staff and visitors to keep up to date.
Future outdoor amenities are planned for the site’s southeastern quadrant, including soccer fields, running paths, and basketball and tennis courts.
Long-term housing includes studio apartments and a limited number of two-, three-, and four-bedroom units, accommodating single people as well as families. Photo: Paul Warchol. Click to enlarge.
The housing village includes studio apartments as well as two-, three-, and four-bedroom units. The larger units are intended to serve the needs of families and people with special needs, as well as groups of graduate students and postdocs. A new house for Janelia’s director was also constructed as part of the project. All housing is within a short walking distance of the landscape building.
Another notable aspect of this project is the lab design. The generic labs in the landscape building incorporate progressive thinking about ease of reconfiguration by users, but also offer an unusually large amount of support space—both in the labs themselves and in the core labs, service corridors, and unprogrammed science spaces. This decision helps ensure that the site will be able to support future research, including work for which tools have not yet been invented or even envisioned.
The general setup for a biochemistry lab locates write-up spaces at the windowed side near the main corridor, but benches can easily be configured to place sitting and standing workstations anywhere along the bench length. Lighting and mechanical systems have been set up so lab spaces can also be converted to office use if required someday. The custom plug-and-play casework design reflects the owner’s desire to create a flexible and aesthetically appealing benchwork and service system.
In addition to the landscape building’s vegetated roof, sustainability features of the campus include high-tech glazing and high-efficiency building systems (including the East Coast’s largest “clean” boiler at 1,300 hp). All of the trees cut on-site during construction were recycled, including use as mulch and as milled plank flooring for guest rooms and visitor housing. Energy-saving LED fixtures manufactured in Europe were selected for street lighting. Stone from the building excavations was crushed and incorporated as aggregate for concrete, which was mixed on-site to minimize transport costs. The two man-made lakes are an integral part of a stormwater retention system, with runoff used for irrigation.
In addition to a full-service cafeteria, the first floor of the lab building offers this poplar rathskeller. Photo: Brad Feinknopf. Click to enlarge.
The buildings’ integration with nature is reinforced not only by the expanses of glass but also the prevalence of light-colored wood in the labs and public spaces. Basalt and granite were employed judiciously as flooring materials in public spaces and for stairways, providing another natural element.
The Results: McGhee and HHMI director Gerry Rubin credit the inspiration of some important architectural antecedents for science, including AT&T’s Bell Labs in Murray Hill, N.J., and the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, U.K. Their impressions about features that produced great science at these facilities informed their program and dialogue with Rafael Viñoly and his team—which originally envisioned imposing a grid on the site rather than the more relaxed curves the project competition proposal assumed.
“The institute’s fundamental idea at Janelia Farm was that you are in an unconstrained connection through your work with nature,” says Viñoly. “If the building is any good, it’s because this idea behind Janelia Farm is very good.”
HHMI COO Cheryl A. Moore says the lab building is bound to inspire creative collisions among colleagues with disparate backgrounds. “That may occur over lunch, during afternoon tea, in the evening at the campus’s pub, while using shared scientific resources, or in the common stock rooms, but not in lengthy administrative meetings.”
Lab of the Year judges believe the Janelia Farm project is both a reflection of today’s best practices and a harbinger for future research communities. “It is possible this could be a breakthrough facility because of the total integration of all operational components on one site,” says Ron Garikes, Karlsberger Laboratory & Technology Group, Birmingham, Ala. “The design effectively accommodates the technical, educational, residential, and administrative functions.”
Erik Mollo-Christensen, Tsoi/Kobus Associates, Cambridge, Mass., says, “The project is the first real research community developed in the U.S. including labs, housing, and conference space. Most research buildings are part of a larger university campus, but Janelia has used the resources and land of HHMI to build a working and living environment beyond anything else. Its contribution is at a much larger scale than a lab building alone, and the science it will facilitate sets a new standard for how research entities organize their scientific programs as well as their buildings.”
Lab design and programming consultant Richard R. Rietz, Helena, Mont., concludes, “We may not see another lab like this in our lifetime. Janelia Farm is a catalog of all the best lab concepts distilled down into one project, and its laboratories will serve as a standard against which everything else will be measured. It will be visited and studied for decades, just like the Salk Institute of four and a half decades earlier.”
The Contact: Robert H. McGhee, HHMI, 713-527-0800.
