Rethinking the Retrofit: How Collaboration Transformed an Aging Academic Lab
Watch the webinar Innovation Through Collaboration: Reimagining Lab Spaces in Higher Education for free, as part of the Academic Lab Design Digital Conference.
Retrofitting an aging academic building into a modern, high-performance research environment is rarely straightforward. Layer in competing stakeholder priorities, legacy infrastructure, budget constraints, and long-standing cultural expectations about lab ownership, and the challenge becomes exponentially more complex. The webinar Innovation Through Collaboration: Reimagining Lab Spaces in Higher Education, part of Lab Design’s Academic Lab Design Digital Conference, tackles this reality head-on, offering a candid, experience-based look at how one university project navigated those tensions—and emerged with a fundamentally different approach to academic lab design.
Drawing from an ongoing renovation at Louisiana State University, this webinar brings together perspectives from architecture, campus planning, and institutional leadership. Naomi Katlowitz of Gensler, Greg LaCour of LSU, and Eric Davis of Tipton Associates walk viewers through not just what the project is becoming, but how it evolved—from an initially conservative, “replace in kind” mindset to a shared, interdisciplinary vision for research space.
This webinar is available for free on demand viewing and is approved by AIA CES for 1 LU credit. Click here to view the webinar for free, as well as the other three webinars in this digital event.
From replacement to reinvention
Greg LaCour, director of campus planning, Louisiana State University
One of the most compelling aspects of the session is its honesty about how dramatically the project’s direction changed. As Greg LaCour explains, the early approach reflected a familiar tendency in higher education: preserving existing space assignments rather than questioning them. “We went from ‘replacing in kind’ to ‘we can bring our researchers into the 21st century’ with the enthusiasm of our new dean, Vicki Colvin,” he says. That shift wasn’t just philosophical—it fundamentally altered how space was planned, shared, and prioritized.
LaCour also underscores the cultural challenge embedded in lab planning. “There is a strong tendency around here to ‘own space,’” he notes, adding that buildings constructed decades ago reinforce compartmentalized ways of working. Large renovation projects, however, offer a rare opening for change. “Big projects are the opportunities for big change. This project is one that is challenging the current faculty to think differently.”
Eric Davis expands on how that leadership-driven vision affected the design process. Rather than responding solely to individual principal investigators, the team recalibrated around institutional goals. “It was important to shift from answering solely to the user groups over to responding to the new college leadership and their vision for research,” Davis explains, acknowledging that this sometimes required saying no to familiar requests—but that trust built over time helped faculty remain open to new ways of working.
Letting the building tell the truth
Naomi Katlowitz, architect, Gensler
The webinar is especially valuable for planners and designers working on adaptive reuse projects, as it does not gloss over the realities of existing buildings.
Naomi Katlowitz emphasizes that successful lab retrofits begin with technical honesty. “The most important lesson is that existing infrastructure, not room layout, must lead the design,” she says.
Floor-to-floor heights, structural capacity, and mechanical systems are not secondary considerations—they are the framework within which everything else must operate.
Rather than forcing a conventional lab template into an incompatible structure, the team embraced modular planning and shared service zones. Katlowitz explains, “This approach allows the lab to evolve over time without continually working against the constraints of the original structure.” Davis adds that early test fits and close coordination with engineers were critical in determining whether the renovation was feasible at all, reinforcing the importance of early analysis before committing institutional resources. “It was ultimately determined that this renovation made the most sense,” he says.
Designing with users, not just for them
Eric Davis, architect, Tipton Associates
A major theme throughout the session is the role of meaningful stakeholder engagement. This was not a box-checking exercise, but a hands-on process that materially shaped the outcome. Katlowitz describes how early user workshops changed the design trajectory: “Walking through a pre-populated lab module with researchers allowed us to test our initial layout in real time.” Those sessions surfaced equipment adjacencies, circulation conflicts, and informal workflows that would never have emerged from traditional programming meetings.
One of the most striking examples of leadership influence came from the decision to relocate a cleanroom. Originally planned for an upper floor to minimize duct runs, the cleanroom was moved to the first floor at the request of the dean. Davis explains that she wanted it visible from the main entrance, so that “the interior of the cleanroom and all its highly technical instruments” would showcase research to visitors and potential faculty. The move wasn’t just symbolic—it reinforced the idea of research as a shared, institutional asset rather than a hidden, departmental one.
Flexibility as a planning strategy
Throughout the webinar, flexibility emerges not as a buzzword, but as a deliberate planning outcome. Katlowitz stresses that adaptability cannot be bolted on late in the process. “Flexibility is fundamentally a planning decision, and not a product selection,” she says. Modular grids, shared infrastructure, and adaptable systems allowed the team to future-proof the labs despite structural and budget constraints.
This approach also supports evolving academic norms. As LaCour notes, expectations around lab ownership are already changing. “Someone starting their career in a shared lab space will expect to share in the future,” he says, while acknowledging that a transitional balance between private and shared environments is still necessary. Over time, however, “the norm will be shared space.”
Watch this webinar on demand for free
For lab planners, architects, facilities leaders, and campus administrators, this session offers more than inspiration. It provides a roadmap for navigating institutional dynamics, making informed decisions about adaptive reuse, and designing academic labs that can evolve alongside research priorities. As Katlowitz succinctly puts it, intentional early collaboration “sets the foundation for a lab that can adapt gracefully over time.”
If you’re grappling with how to modernize existing facilities, encourage interdisciplinary collaboration, or align individual researcher needs with long-term institutional goals, this on-demand webinar delivers thoughtful, experience-driven guidance worth your time. Click here to view this webinar for free.
