Planning for Change in the Sustainable Laboratory

Stephen Bartlett and Jonathan Friedan, Ballinger

The ability of a Laboratory Building to evolve with changing research agendas and prolong its useful life is fundamental to sustainability. This implies a pre-investment and systems flexibility to enable this evolution that must be balanced against financial realities of the project and rightsizing of systems for efficiency. This presentation will show how lab buildings can be planned with specific targeted convertibility zones to enable flexibility over time without implying a loss of efficiency due to over design of systems or undue financial burden. Finding the appropriate level of pre-investment that extends the useful life of the building is the most sustainable and cost-effective real estate strategy over the life cycle of the building.

The presentation will cover case studies of 8 academic and corporate research buildings, all either recently completed or under construction or design by the presenters. Each will illustrate a specific lab planning flexibility requirement and the corresponding systems response it sponsored. The projects are all research buildings in life sciences fields. Included will be research buildings for Brown University, University of Maryland, University of Pennsylvania, Johns Hopkins University, Vistakon, and other examples from the pharmaceutical industry. The individual examples incorporate various sustainable features in their conception and detail, but it is the organizational strategies and lab planning principles that will be forwarded as the main subject for this presentation. The presentation will include images and colored plan diagrams that visually illustrate the concepts presented.

Findings:

There are several specific factors that contribute to a premature obsolescence in lab buildings that we encounter on a regular basis with our clients. Specifically, they are the inability of the building to accommodate:

• the changing ratios of lab to lab support to office space,
• the ever growing need for lab support and equipment storage spaces,
• the specific needs of new equipment, be they power, HVAC capacity or vibration stability,
• the more rigorous safety regulations for personnel.

There are specific ways one can plan to mitigate or avoid these pitfalls in the way the buildings are organized and the systems are conceived and integrated. The case studies will show specific responses to these issues in current lab building projects including strategies for:

• accommodating reporting/officing areas and their relationship to labs,
• including flexible lab support areas and linear equipment rooms,
• differentiating between generic and instrument specific research space,
• dealing with transition flex zones between different functional areas.

The appropriate integration of these strategies creates buildings that will have a longer useful life due to their abilities to adapt to changing demands from research programs.

Labs21 Connection:

Our intention is to present a holistic view of lab planning and it's relationship to sustainability and life cycle cost implications by targeting the long term evolution of the building The presentation will demonstrate a general planning issue and specific building systems response pairing that is applicable to projects for research buildings across the life science fields.

The presenters work in an integrated Architecture and Engineering environment that actively pursues sustainability, efficiency and flexibility in the design of lab buildings. The case studies proposed present the current state of practice in lab planning and building engineering systems

Biographies:

Stephen Bartlett is a Senior Design Architect with expertise in the planning and design of contemporary architecture. An American citizen working in Europe, Stephen was recruited to join Ballinger after ten years with Bureau ASSAR, in Brussels, Belgium. In addition to a number of major urban buildings, he worked there on projects for pharmaceutical companies, including GlaxoSmithKline Biologicals and UCB.

Jonathan Freidan
Not available at this time.

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