Research science is one of the most demanding usages of a given built space. The requirements, whether general or highly specialized, typically reach the outer limits of building safety and energy codes while the required infrastructure to support the various types of equipment set a premium on construction costs and demand for space. Moreover, design has to address the massive operational costs; the Whole Building Design Guide warns a typical laboratory consumes five times the energy and water per square foot of a typical office building. The upshot of these demands? Owner-stakeholders press designers to deliver facilities that maximize the usage and earnings potential of each square foot.
In 2007, Yale University, New Haven, Conn., acquired the former Bayer Pharmaceutical complex in Orange, Conn., adding 460,000 square feet to Yale Medical School’s expanding West Campus Integrated Science & Technology Center (W-ISTC). Administrators hoped to create a research hub for leading scientists and quickly realized that although the buildings had always been used for research, there were deficiencies in their design that placed severe restrictions on the types of equipment and scientific study the school could accommodate, not to mention near-zero flexibility for changing modes of research. Furthermore, the drab and poorly lit interiors—typical of conventional catchall laboratory design—would hardly suit the prestige project envisioned by Yale.
The university engaged local architecture, art and consulting firm Svigals + Partners (S+P) LLP to renovate, retrofit and reprogram two floors of W-ISTC’s W B-24 building for Yale Medical School’s Nanobiology Institute. The goal was to transform the roughly 22,000 square feet of pharmaceutical research space into the desired academic science hub: one that well serves the science it houses while attracting and retaining top talent.
Pre-design Investigation
S+P has an established laboratory design practice area and had already completed several retrofit and adaptive reuse projects for other research facilities on the Yale campus. The university’s need to keep the construction timeframe short and costs as low as possible presented a major challenge. The S+P design team completed a thorough investigation of the former Bayer building to see what elements could be repurposed and which ones absolutely could not.
The design team embraced a pragmatic philosophy that the positive aspects of the old design could be preserved and blended into the new design. It elected to refurbish existing lab benches with electrostatic painting, for instance, fitting them with new wood shelves and wood-faced rolling cabinets. Later, the construction team restored the epoxy bench surfaces to like-new condition. This flexible and economical solution exploited the durability of the well-crafted older benches and added a warm new look. Broken doors on upper metal cabinets were mended or replaced. The team reused existing flooring, utilizing a splicing technique to combine the old Bayer floors with new welded seamless tracts. The design scheme reused the entire existing ceiling grid, replacing only tiles and lighting.
Additionally, S+P saved Yale much of the cost of new ventilation hoods, essential and expensive pieces of equipment that draw potentially contaminated air away from experimentation areas to be filtered and exhausted. They accomplished the savings by refurbishing the existing hoods remaining in the facility. Ultimately, S+P’s designers were able to save the university about 50 percent on construction and equipment costs when compared to a total gut renovation.
Once exposed, certain infrastructure elements clearly required replacement, such as the existing pipes for deionized water delivery. But the infrastructure had already been designed to support world-class scientific investigation. Certain aspects, like electric, only required enough modification to support the new floor plan, which was significantly altered from what it had been.