The modern and visually engaging building features 35 research and teaching laboratories, 9,000 square feet of faculty research space, a 273-seat auditorium and a three-story green roof. Los Angeles-based CO Architects served as the architect on the project, while Pasadena, Calif.-headquartered C.W. Driver served as general contractor and locally based Anthony Mason & Associates was the project’s construction manager.

The project team was primarily charged with upgrading the university’s science facilities in a way that would keep the university competitive in the sciences, accommodate growing interest in the field and ultimately meet the needs of students seeking a high-caliber science education, according to Tina Choe, dean of the Frank R. Seaver College of Science and Engineering at LMU.

“The new building has come to embody the university’s commitment to the sciences and the community,” Choe added. “The building promotes best practices in science education in a setting that incorporates some of the latest technologies. The building’s design facilitates active, hands-on experimental work.”

Programmatically, the university moved the science departments from an existing building that didn’t allow for easy or fluid interaction between the various disciplines, according to Arnold Swanborn, LEED AP BD+C, associate principal at CO Architects. “The primary goal was to create a building with an understanding that science is changing and is more interdisciplinary — or rather transdisciplinary,” he said. “The second thing is to really have the building be a tool for teaching, so it’s a building for science but also for natural science and botany.”

A Transparent Design
The facility was designed with new technologies to promote collaboration. Laboratory and research space take the place of traditional classrooms so that students will learn science by putting it into practice and integrating concepts with hands-on work to prepare future scientists.
The project’s objective to put science on display was achieved through openness and transparency in the design. This was carried out not only on the interior of the building via research and teaching labs configured with floor-to-ceiling glass storefronts allowing students to observe what their peers are working on, according to Matthew Wilt, project manager at C.W. Driver, but also on the exterior with an auditorium that features an overhead green roof terrace that functions as an outdoor living laboratory.

“We used a lot of glass, so there’s a lot of transparency from the corridor into the classroom,” Swanborn added. “Science used to be behind doors and walls, but now it’s on display and becomes an interactive layer. That was a pretty important thing for us and involved a lot of relocation and rethinking of the laboratories. Lab planners and professors worked with us to make it a very open building.”

“In a reinterpretation of the classic Spanish Revival vernacular of the campus, we wrapped the program around an active central courtyard, while incorporating a three-story green roof connecting to outdoor terraces,” added Paul Zajfen, FAIA, design principal at CO Architects.

The C.W. Driver team had to account for the hundreds of thousands of pounds of weight created by the green roof, which rests on top of the steel-structured auditorium. To ensure the building would not droop or deflect once the green roof was added, the team used cables to ground and preload the steel structure to account for the future weight prior to installation, Wilt said.

Sustainable design and construction were also key elements of the project. Initially, the university’s goal was to achieve LEED Silver certification, but the project ultimately achieved LEED Gold through a number of measures taken to minimize its environmental impact. For example, the project features more than 8,200 square feet of solar panels that produce approximately 10 percent of the facility’s energy needs. Swanborn added that a significant amount of natural daylight was also introduced into the lab spaces.

Safety & Security
As the building houses sensitive scientific tools, materials and activities, the CO Architects team took specific safety concerns into account during the design process. For instance, Swanborn said that the design team carefully considered how the students would work with explosive and flammable chemicals — not what you would typically consider in a classroom building. In response, the team included things like gas and electrical shutoffs as well as safety showers in every lab. Standard laboratory fume hoods, which Swanborn considers a first line of defense against inhaling toxic chemicals, were included throughout. Other key security elements include security cameras and secure entrances.

Read more about this project in the upcoming June Safety & Security issue of School Construction News, available soon.
 

The post Science on Display appeared first on School Construction News.

The building features 35 research and teaching laboratories, 9,000 square feet of faculty research space, a 273-seat auditorium and a three-story green roof. Los Angeles-based CO Architects served as the architect on the project, while Pasadena, Calif.-headquartered C.W. Driver completed construction.

The main goal of the project was to provide a necessary upgrade to the university’s science facilities in a way that would keep the university competitive in the sciences, accommodate growing interest in the field and ultimately meet the needs of students seeking a high-caliber science education, according to Tina Choe, dean of the Frank R. Seaver College of Science and Engineering.

“The new building has come to embody the university’s commitment to the sciences and the community. The building promotes best practices in science education in a setting that incorporates some of the latest technologies,” Choe added. “The building’s design facilitates active, hands-on experimental work.”

The $110 million facility was designed with new technologies to promote collaboration. Laboratory and research space take the place of traditional classrooms so that students will learn science by putting science into practice, integrating concepts with hands-on work to prepare future scientists. “By design, the building also fosters an interdisciplinary, collaborative approach to addressing key research questions,” Choe said.

One of the design team’s main objectives was to put science on display, which was achieved through openness and transparency in the design. This was carried out not only on the interior of the building via research and teaching labs configured with floor-to-ceiling glass storefront to allow students to observe what their peers are working on, but also on the exterior with an auditorium that features a green roof terrace that functions as an outdoor living laboratory, according to Matthew Wilt, project manager at C.W. Driver.

“In a reinterpretation of the classic Spanish Revival vernacular of the campus, we wrapped the program around an active central courtyard, while incorporating a three-story green roof connecting to outdoor terraces,” added Paul Zajfen, FAIA, design principal at CO Architects. “Technologically enhanced research facilities with large glazed surfaces increase visibility, allowing teaching and research activities to be easily observed without disturbance.”

In building the auditorium, the C.W. Driver team had to account for the hundreds of thousands of pounds of weight created by the green roof, which would rest on top of the steel structure. To ensure the building would not droop or deflect once the green roof was added, the team used cables to ground and preload the steel structure to account for the future weight, Wilt said.

Environmental sustainability in the building’s design and construction was also important to the university. Designed to achieve LEED Gold certification, a number of measures were taken to minimize the building’s impact on the environment. For example, the project features more than 8,200 square feet of solar panels that produce about 10 percent of the facility’s energy needs.

During construction, the project team used a variety of new technologies such as REVit, BIM360 and Box.com to help with coordination, communication and verification. These programs helped the team complete the job on time and reduce any problems early on in the process, according to Wilt.

“Because we were able to essentially build the project within those programs prior to the start of actual construction, we could electronically coordinate with all subcontractors — from the framing and plaster contractors to electrical and plumbing — and map out how the variety of different systems would live in the walls together,” Wilt said. “As a result, we were able to avoid typical project stalls, such as materials not fitting properly, calling for the engineer to come out, assess and revise the plans on paper, and even coordinate the prefabrication of systems like the plumbing racks offsite, to further increase productivity and remain on schedule.”

The biggest challenge on the project was figuring out how to minimize disruption to the school’s normal class schedule and on-campus events, Wilt said. A 12-foot wood sound wall was set around the construction site along with various containment rooms made for cutting steel and other construction materials to help reduce any noise. C.W. Driver also opted to use an electronic-powered tower crane to assist with construction, which cut down additional noise and fumes, according to Wilt.

The post LMU’s New Life Sciences Building Promotes Collaboration appeared first on School Construction News.

Los Angeles-based CO Architects, alongside locally based Train & Partners Architects, designed the ERC. The four-level, 46,000-square-foot facility is being constructed for the UVA Health System on a tight site across from the UVA Medical Center, between the Emily Couric Clinical Cancer Center and a hospital parking garage.

“The Education Resource Center takes advantage of its strategic location and is designed as a simple connector to allow people access to the cancer center, hospital and garage,” said Paul Zajfen, FAIA, RIBA, design principal at CO Architects, in a statement.

Scheduled to open in 2016, the ERC will support educational programs and patient services. The basement will feature a pharmacy and will be used for diagnostic procedures, including radiology and MRI scans. The second floor will house multipurpose learning spaces and a procedural simulation lab for graduate medical education. It will provide access to an enclosed walkway that will lead over the street from the parking garage to the hospital lobby. The top floor, which is set back from the lower levels to minimize the building mass, will feature future offices, learning environments and additional simulation spaces.

CO Architects and Train & Partners Architects are working together to achieve a LEED Silver rating for the project. The building’s main façade will be sheathed in high-performance, fritted glass and shaded by a metal canopy extending from the second level. The facility’s rear exterior wall, located next to nearby railroad tracks, will be clad in brick. 


The ERC’s green roofs will absorb stormwater run-off and provide a garden-like visual to observe from the hospital’s patient rooms across the street. Grassy, sloping planes will extend from the concrete-paved plaza at the front of the building to the second level and basement. An outdoor staircase will offer access from the plaza to the second-floor educational spaces, and benches will provide waiting places next to the drop-off area at the street. 


CO Architects has a long history designing academic medical campuses, including the Claude Moore Medical Education Building for the UVA School of Medicine. The McCarthy and Donley’s team is also working on a separate $18 million HVAC project for the UVA Medical Center, which began in August 2013. The team is replacing 11 air-handling units in a two-year project expected to wrap up by August 2015.

The post Education Resource Center to Debut at UVA Medical Campus appeared first on School Construction News.

The $232 million complex, located in Portland, opened for all programs in the fall of 2014. It consists of both the 12-story Skourtes Tower on the north and a five-story south wing connected by an atrium. It features lecture halls, classroom labs, specialty research centers, OHSU School of Dentistry facilities and offices for health professionals and educators from multiple institutions. Approximately 3,000 students use the building per day to study medicine, nursing, dentistry, pharmacy, chemistry and biology.

Last year, the building achieved LEED Platinum certification, making it one of only two buildings in the country comprising more than 500,000 square feet to achieve this rating. Its sustainable features include green roofs, stormwater collection for non-potable water uses, energy-efficient lighting and climate control. It also incorporates a large amount of daylight thanks to the plethora of windows placed throughout the building.

Thanks to all these features, the complex was also named a 2015 Top Ten Green Project by the American Institute of Architects (AIA) Committee on the Environment (COTE), earned a 2015 Innovation Award from the AIA Technology in Architectural Practice group and won a 2015 Excellence in Architecture Merit Award from the Society of College and University Planners, in association with AIA Committee on Architecture for Education.

“CLSB demonstrates that even a large building with a complex program can achieve high performance,” noted the AIA/COTE award jurors. “This building has a remarkable 67 percent of its occupants able to use public transit, cycling, or walking to access the site, and it houses 400 bike parking spaces. The façade thoughtfully handles solar control and daylight harvesting.”

The post Portland’s Collaborative Life Sciences Building Earns Recognition appeared first on School Construction News.

The UT Austin campus was originally master planned by the Beaux Arts architect Paul Cret of Philadelphia. Within the original core there are a number of iconic Italianate and Romanesque-style buildings that have received — or are eligible for — national register designation.

Within this context, CO Architects needed to design a facility to house modern research and teaching space for the College of Natural Sciences, which includes the college’s molecular bioscience, chemistry, organic chemistry and neuroscience disciplines. That building, the 295,000-square foot Norman Hackerman Building, would require state-of-the-art facilities and much more program space than the school’s existing chemistry building, Welch Hall, which was erected in 1929, allowed.

“[Welch Hall] was no longer well suited for modern science,” said Andrew Labov, AIA, LEED AP, principal at CO Architects. “Contemporary research is really about promoting collaboration and providing shared access to sophisticated equipment. It requires buildings that are much deeper and fatter to get more program on the same floor, and we weren’t able to adapt the existing building, which was very narrow.”

Renovating Welch Hall with laboratories that were less systems-intensive, and demolishing the adjacent 1950s-era Experimental Science Building, which did not have historical significance, became the obvious solution, allowing CO Architects a wider and deeper site to on which to establish the Norman Hackerman Building floor plate. “In order to do that we temporarily relocated seven mature oak trees, then brought them back after the building was finished,” said David Johnson, AIA, LEED AP, an associate principal at CO Architects.

However, an additional hurdle in the $126 million project came in the form of the university’s most recent master plan, which was completed in the late 1990s, requiring that new construction adhere to the existing aesthetic of tripartite wall organization and clay tile roofs. Designing a modern, sustainable science facility that met these requirements inspired CO Architects to challenge the master plan guidelines and urge university officials to embrace alternatives.

“The question became, ‘how do you build a modern science building whose goal was to achieve LEED Gold in the middle of this original, historic 40-acre core of the campus?’” Labov said. “The Norman Hackerman Building has the largest solar hot water array in Texas, and trying to marry that with a clay tile aesthetic — and not just look like we were mounting solar panels on a clay tile roof — really required some changes to the aesthetics. We actually had to go to the Board of Trustees for the university to get approval for changes to the master plan.”

This approach inspired trustees to update the master plan to allow for greater flexibility in integrating sustainable design solutions, doing away with the clay tile roof mandate. “New buildings still have to have a wall architecture that is respectful of the massing and materials and organization of the existing buildings, but the notion of replicating 1930s clay tile roof architecture is no longer required,” Labov continued.

Today, the six-story Norman Hackerman Building both responds to and reflects its context in terms of form, scale, massing, materials and proportion, as well as how it meets the sloping ground plane, touches the sky and relates to its architectural neighbors. The high-performance curtain wall and cantilevered steel sunshade assembly with perforated metal shade panels complement the brick, limestone and precast concrete mass, which reinterprets the dominant campus vocabulary in a more abstract composition.

As the building was CO Architects’ first project with UT Austin, the biggest challenge was developing a strong rapport with the owner to allow such substantial deviations from the original project outline and master plan.

“In terms of process, what is important is to really engage with the owner at the very beginning of the project, especially when you’re looking at something as radical as knocking down an existing building,” Johnson said.

“It really required building consensus and local trust in the project and in our process,” Labov added.

Learn how CO Architects took a different approaching by engaging an existing university campus master plan in the July/August issue of School Construction News.

The post CO Architects Take on UT Austin Master Plan appeared first on School Construction News.

The post CO Architects Recognized Internationally for Phoenix Building Facade appeared first on School Construction News.

Columbia selected the architectural team through a design competition, which invited five firms to participate. During the competition phase, the university issued a program of their requirements for use in the competition, and the architect designed a building that was based on that program. The site was originally planned to contain a three-story building of 65,000 square feet; however, COFXFOWLE created an alternative approach that included a seven-story building built on half the site. This created a more compact, lower cost and more energy-efficient building while also saving the remaining site for future construction planning.

“We proposed a building that used half the footprint but was twice as high. We used that as a way to create a real presence for the nursing school on the site,” said Guy Geier, FAIA at FXFOWLE. “It also allows for more vertical connectivity. There is an open staircase, which we call ‘the ribbon,’ that winds its way up and connects all floors in a very visible way and really creates a sense of community and continuity between all functions of the building.”
The nursing school needed a new space largely for the simulation labs, Geier said. The school has been operating out of an old facility that was originally built as a residential building renovated to accommodate nursing school functions such as administration office space, student space as well as simulation labs and educational spaces. As the nursing school program grew and expanded, the university realized it needed a new site that would accommodate the needs of the staff and students.
The school’s ground floor includes a gallery, café, student lounge, a large conference room, student services including financial aid and admissions, and a multipurpose community space. The second and third floors provide simulation labs and faculty offices, conference spaces, student study rooms and informal spaces. These labs mimic hospital patient and operating rooms, incorporating responsive mannequins and other education technology that prepare nurses for different real-life situations that occur on the job. Administrative offices and reception and conference areas occupy the fourth floor. The fifth and sixth floors include faculty offices, conference rooms, and breakout and study areas. On the uppermost level is a rooftop terrace to be used as a flexible lounge or study space, as well as used for informal student and faculty gatherings and special events.
“At the heart of this facility was the expressed need to have the highest quality clinical skills and simulation training that the school could find,” said Scott Kelsey, FAIA for CO Architects. “We spent an enormous amount of time working with them to think through that programmatic element. One of the challenges was working with them in developing the program and planning our way through it recognizing that skills and simulation training is a rapidly evolving learning space type.”
Geier said another one of the biggest challenges was managing the needs of the school against the budget. As cost escalation starts to creep back into the marketplace, there’s an ongoing and constant need to manage expectations against the budget, he said. He is “fairly confident” they’re on track in terms of budget because the design team had a cost estimator on board and Columbia hired a construction manager, New York-based TDX Construction Corporation, early enough during schematic design to give input in terms of the selection of materials.

Kelsey added that another issue was trying to think carefully about office space: what’s the right size and how to allocate faculty office space given the fact that space is tight. Geier said the design team worked very closely with faculty to look at their own workspace requirements.
“Most universities and colleges have standards that have been set up historically for faculty offices that are larger than they could be in terms of functionality especially with new furniture systems that are available,” Geier said. “We often find that less space is still very functional. Faculty members are often out of their offices in a lab or some other setting with students. Working with the faculty at the nursing school, we were able to propose a shift into those areas of the program that they were spending time in. It requires a faculty that is more open-minded and that looks at the space requirements more holistically.”
Architecturally, the design has followed the idea that the cladding of the building in part is made of different layers of glass, Kelsey said, and it is designed to achieve LEED Silver certification.
“It’s seen as a beacon and creates a strong identity for the school,” he said. “We’ve designed a lot of health science environments, and there’s been a real desire and development in open and transparent interiors so one can get a sense of everything that’s happening. It’s a very forward-thinking building that puts learning on display.”

The post Columbia University to Build New Nursing School appeared first on School Construction News.

The $187 million building, which serves both the University of Arizona College of Medicine-Phoenix and Northern Arizona University, was noted for its boldness and innovative design of the interdisciplinary building that serves the colleges of medicine allied health and biomedical informatics. The new building is located on the Phoenix Biomedical Campus in downtown Phoenix.

“The design team found an opportunity to place a powerful symbol of a region’s identity, a canyon for higher learning, in the middle of a chaotic modern city. In effect, the architecture represents a geological formation, providing for a landmark for self- reflection and discourse, and the fluid exchange of ideas for healing,” said Paul Zajfen, FAIA, design principal for CO Architects. “This concept of geology would be accessible and visible to the city, expressed literally on the surfaces of the building’s copper façade, which mimics the rock striations found in the Arizona landscape – striations that are the records of geology’s adaptations to events throughout time. Canyons appear to be cut out of the building, through the façade at strategic points, creating areas for skylights and light wells.”

The HSBE was one of four designs chosen for the AIACC’s Honor Award out of 279 entries.

The design of 286,000-square-foot, six-story building was inspired by the surrounding landscape of the Arizona desert, as well as the geology of the mountains and canyons. The desert-like appearance was executed through the use of striated and folded exterior copper cladding as well as the two wings of the building, which create intentionally narrow “canyons.”

“The search for a cladding material that supported the goal of representing the Arizona landscape led to copper panels, because copper is a recyclable, self-finishing, naturally weathering material that has symbolic power as one of the natural resources of Arizona,” Zajfen said.

The building was constructed to meet LEED-NC Gold certification and paid special attention to the use of abundant Arizona daylight and responds to the areas need to reduce energy consumption. The lower level of the building and fewer windows as the building gets higher for heat control. The south-facing facades combine overhangs with perforated screens to function as sunshades and vertical fins control on the north side of the building.

“This building makes a statement on the land, while also being contextual to the site. Its bold design, shape, and color are appealing,” Zajfen said. “The creativity and effort that went into the exterior skin of the building is a factor, as well.”

Ayers Saint Gross, with offices in Tempe, Ariz., served as associate architect and master planner for the project while a joint venture between DPR Construction and Sundt Construction, both with offices in Phoenix, led construction.

Other awards for CO Architect’s design of HSBE include the AIA National Technology in Architectural Practice Building Information Model Excellence Award for Stellar Architecture Using BIM; the Best of LA Architects Award from the Los Angeles Business Council; an International Interior Design Association Southwest Chapter Pride Awards Design Excellence in Education and Outstanding Team on a Design Project award; and the Arizona Real Estate and Development Award for Most Challenging Project. The design is also a finalist for the Arizona Forward Environmental Excellence Award.

The post Health Sciences Education Building Receives Top Honors appeared first on School Construction News.