From Old to High-Performing: Navigating the Complexities of Breathing New Life into Existing Buildings

2025 Lab Design Conference speaker—Dave Swanson, project manager, principal, DLR Group

Amid rising construction costs and a growing imperative for sustainability, the adaptive reuse of existing buildings has become a powerful strategy for delivering high-performing laboratory environments. In their session at the 2025 Lab Design Conference in Denver, CO, DLR Group’s Dave Swanson and Nick Kreitler explored the benefits and challenges of revitalizing underutilized structures into vibrant scientific workplaces.

Drawing from their work on two precedent-setting projects—NIST Building 1 in Boulder, CO, and the Biodesix facility in Boulder, CO—Swanson and Kreitler shared hard-won lessons, emphasizing how feasibility studies, collaboration, and design agility can transform even the most outdated facilities into cutting-edge spaces for innovation.

The case for adaptive reuse

Retrofitting and renovating existing structures offers compelling advantages over new construction, including shorter timelines, lower embodied carbon, and significant cost savings. But as Swanson pointed out in their talk, From Old to High-Performing: Navigating the Complexities of Breathing New Life into Existing Buildings, such projects also demand a heightened level of coordination: “Renovations are difficult, right? So you’ve got to work within the box that’s provided to you. Sometimes you’ve got to add to the box.”

Kreitler underscored the importance of upfront investigations to avoid costly surprises later in the process: “One of the biggest things that we always advocate for is that feasibility study—really understanding what type of utilities, what type of infrastructure, what type of floor-to-floor heights you have to work within. Early identification of that is going to help inform the project budget and help drive that schedule forward”.

NIST Building 1: modernizing a concrete icon

At the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Boulder, DLR Group faced the challenge of renovating Wing 5 of a sprawling mid-century building complex—without altering its defining architectural character. “We’re conditioned with the concrete box, and we’ve got to fit everything into this concrete box,” Swanson explained. “We had to cram all of that [infrastructure] into this very rigid, difficult box to work within.”

The solution required precise coordination and imaginative programming. The team conducted weekly meetings with contractors and engineers to designate utility zones and balance competing priorities of lab flexibility and mechanical routing. The result? A LEED Gold-certified facility that supports cutting-edge research in optics, cryogenics, and metrology—despite ceiling heights that, in some cases, dropped as low as eight feet six inches.

Read more about this project in Lab Design News: “The Evolution of a Lab Space: NIST's Wing 5 Renovation”

Beyond mechanical challenges, the NIST project also prioritized well-being and wayfinding. Scientists were previously working in windowless corridors with little visual orientation or connection to one another. By relocating corridors closer to the perimeter and clustering offices and collaboration nodes near vertical circulation, the design brought in daylight and created layered opportunities for informal interaction. “Some scientists may recharge over that coffee and conversation over the stair. Some may need a dark, quiet room with some music,” said Swanson. “Ultimately, amenities are no longer an employee perk—it is vital for health and well-being and recruiting and retention of talent.”

Biodesix Boulder: a big-box store becomes a diagnostic hub

2025 Lab Design Conference speaker—Nick Kreitler, senior laboratory planner | architect, DLR Group

In a striking example of creative reuse, a former big-box store in Boulder was transformed into a 58,000-sf diagnostic testing facility for Biodesix. Kreitler described the challenges of converting this office-type structure into a high-performing lab: “We had a chemistry suite on the second floor that, if all those hoods were in use, it’s about 33,000 CFM. So that’s a tremendous amount of air that we needed to move.”

To accommodate the necessary infrastructure, the team removed an existing mezzanine and added substantial steel reinforcement, ultimately installing a generator on the roof and laying a nitrogen tank horizontally to preserve key views. “We had to get very creative,” said Kreitler. “It was really important to have a client that understood we were going to move very quickly—we need decisions quickly, but we also have to plan around that flexibility.”

That flexibility was built into the design from the start. Lab modules were planned on an 11-foot grid to allow for future adaptability, with services distributed overhead and ample drops for local exhaust. This foresight paid off when additional cell culture suites were added just two weeks before construction documents were submitted. “We knew that the equipment was going to continue to change,” Kreitler said. “It’s still easier for them to modify today than what they had ever envisioned for themselves.”

Lessons learned: planning, flexibility, and people

Both projects underscored the critical role of early planning and client collaboration. “Project success is really with that groundwork built up front,” said Swanson. “Those feasibility studies, those site assessments, really help establish: What are you working with here? What has to go? What can we maybe make work?”

Another major takeaway was the importance of being nimble. “Raise your hand if you’ve ever had a project that didn’t go through a value engineering session—and please tell me your secret,” Swanson joked. “You have to be nimble. You have to be flexible in your approach. The easy button to save money is not always the right suggestion.”

Equally vital is designing with scientists’ needs at the center. Both NIST and Biodesix emphasized spaces that support mental clarity, collaboration, and well-being—from biophilic features to daylighting to well-equipped break areas. As Kreitler noted, “They wanted to create a space that actually reflected that. They wanted to focus on the people—the talent retention. Everybody’s focused on, ‘How do we get the right people?’”

A blueprint for sustainable transformation

Adaptive reuse is not without its hurdles—tight floor-to-floor heights, antiquated utilities, and legacy infrastructure all require thoughtful solutions. But as these case studies show, breathing new life into old buildings can yield flexible, resilient laboratories that meet the demands of modern science without the environmental cost of ground-up construction.

With the right strategy and mindset, even the most unlikely building can become a high-performing scientific asset. “It may look a little rough at the start,” said Kreitler, “but because we were able to work very quickly with the developer and with the contractor, we were able to identify a path forward.”

Lab renovations, reuse, and retrofitting will be a key topic the 2026 Lab Design Conference, taking place in Orlando, FL, on May 11-14. Join our mailing list at https://www.labdesignconference.com/ for information regarding the speaker agenda, networking opportunities with lab design/build professionals, and our add-on lab tours and workshops.