Creating a building to house highly sophisticated research activities requires design expertise and a working technical knowledge of the particular science. Our three recent laboratory schemes showcase our approach to designing innovative and operationally efficient facilities to support some of the UK’s leading researchers:
A new research building housing cryo-electron microscopy, X-ray crystallography and NMR spectroscopy laboratories. It provides an integrated and collaborative facility for the study of protein structure and function.
This project relocates York St John University’s Sports Science department to its sports campus. The ground floor accommodation includes two large, flexible and highly transparent laboratories for the physiological monitoring of athletes.
This project links and extends two existing adjacent science buildings to provide additional laboratory and research office space, and to foster synergy between two field leading research bodies.
Based on our sector insight and close partnership working with clients, we share here our ‘top tips’ for laboratory design:
1. Close engagement with key stakeholders is essential
The term “laboratory” covers a wide range of types of space. Functionality is paramount in lab design and the users very specific requirements must be met if they are to operate successfully. Close engagement with key stakeholders is essential to accurately establish these requirements. Typically, client bodies for laboratories include a number of different scientists, each with a very detailed knowledge of the requirements of a small part of the overall facility. The key is to ensure that all voices are heard during the briefing process and their requirements are distilled into an agreed project brief with detailed room data sheets. We have found workshops at the start of a project are an excellent way to engage with stakeholders, establishing trust and learning about their needs.
2. Know the site inside out
Understanding the site is crucial on any project but becomes particularly important when working on science parks and university campuses where there is often extensive hidden service infrastructure. Topographical and below ground surveys must be acquired at the earliest opportunity to identify landscape, levels and hidden services, so that the scheme can be designed to suit. The “plate glass” universities of the 1960’s often have asbestos in the ground as well as the buildings!
3. Research precedent buildings
A lot can be learned from visiting existing laboratories. During the early design stage of the Eleanor& Guy Dodson Building we accompanied the key stakeholders to view field leading cryo-EM facilities at the University of Cambridge. This included a fascinating guided tour by the Nobel prize winning scientist Professor Richard Henderson around the laboratories at MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, followed by a visit to the Department of Materials Science & Metallurgy. These building visits stimulated debate between the project stakeholders and design team.
4. Understand the lab activities & equipment - establish the plant space requirements early
There is great diversity in laboratory types and requirements, but all must provide a stable environment to enable accurate test data to be produced and replicated. Establishing the internal environmental requirements of the labs on your project is a very important early activity. This calls for detailed discussion with the end-user scientists to fully understand the activities they will be undertaking, input from an experienced building services engineer, and a working knowledge of the specialist pieces of scientific kit which are to be housed.
Having established the schedule of accommodation and the internal environmental requirements, the design team can start to develop the best servicing strategy for the building. The plant requirements of laboratory buildings can vary significantly depending on the size of the facility and the degree to which the internal environmental must be controlled. So, a key early design activity is for the building services engineer to make a realistic assessment of the space needed to accommodate all of the plant.
5. Get the structure and construction methodology right
The structure and construction methods must be carefully chosen to suit the internal environmental conditions required. Where these environmental conditions are not particularly onerous, how the scheme is built is likely to be most influenced by cost and speed of construction. However, in a laboratory with complex environmental criteria the construction methodology is likely to be driven by deciding how best to meet these requirements. For instance, the structure and construction type used on the Eleanor & Guy Dodson Building was dictated by the need for a vibration free environment. This led to the two largest laboratories being constructed as separated isolated boxes with heavy load bearing masonry walls and very thick concrete slabs.
6. Make sure services integrate with the building fabric
Laboratories are normally highly serviced buildings packed with plant. An important element of a laboratory’s success or failure is how well integrated the plant is with the building fabric. Things to decide include where best to locate the plant, how building services are to be distributed, and whether the services are hidden from view or exposed for all to see.
7. Don’t forget about sustainability
Due to their extensive building services systems, laboratories typically use far more energy than most other building types. It is therefore particularly important that designers take what measures they can to make laboratories as sustainable and low energy as they can be. Ventilation, cooling, heating and lighting systems should be selected for their longevity, ease of maintenance and energy saving performance, and the building envelope should be well insulated and airtight to help reduce capital and operational costs, improve energy efficiency and in so doing reduce carbon emissions.
8. Get daylight in where you can
To deliver strict internal environmental requirements, some laboratory spaces must exclude daylight. For the wellbeing of the researchers, contact with outside views and changes in external light and weather conditions is essential. Whilst the labs themselves may have to be ‘black boxes’, designers should seek to get daylight into other spaces, especially office and write-up areas, wherever possible.
9. Design for interaction and to showcase the facilities
Our clients increasingly want lab buildings which foster collaboration and interaction between scientists as they have found this helps develop new ideas and speeds up progress. The provision of adequate social spaces can help engender further scientific interaction. In addition, laboratory buildings regularly accommodate visitors and it is important that they are designed to display their facilities to best effect. Our Sports Science building was designed to showcase the large ground floor laboratories through the provision of large internal glazed screens which offer views into the labs from the adjacent circulation routes.
10. Allow for the moving of kit and future proofing
Laboratory facilities should be designed to be easy to use. This includes practical requirements such as how chemicals and new equipment can be moved into and around the building throughout its life. Appropriately sized circulation routes to accommodate this must be established at an early planning stage, complete with doors of adequate height and width. In the Eleanor & Guy Dodson building, access for the delivery and replacement of large scale microscopes was a key design criterion. Circulation routes and room sizes were provided to accommodate both the client’s initially selected equipment and the larger instruments that they might subsequently replace it with.
For further information on these projects, or further insight within the science/laboratory sector, please see: https://www.stephenhillarchitects.com/sectors-science