Janelia Farm Research Campus embodies flexible
lab design and fosters a culture of science.
The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), Chevy Chase, Md., had a vision of building an advanced research center that would serve as an intellectual hub for hundreds of scientists from diverse disciplines with the long-term objective of offering creative scientists freedom from constraints that limit their ability to do groundbreaking research in conventional research settings. This vision has been realized in the Janelia Farm Research Campus, Ashburn, Va., R&D Magazine’s 2007 Lab of the Year.
Janelia Farm’s landscape laboratory building is built into the slope of the site with views over the conference housing. Photo: Paul Fetters
Janelia Farm scientists work together in multidisciplinary teams to solve challenging biological problems that are difficult to address in existing research settings. Such collaborative groups are self-assembling and not imposed in any way. The scientific programs at Janelia Farm are designed to further collaboration and creativity among scientists. The architectural design of the Janelia Farm buildings and its laboratories respond to these same objectives, with both work and relaxation areas designed to promote interaction and collegiality—and discourage isolation.
“When I visited the building on a cold, grey February day, I was invited to wait in the pub. At 9 a.m., the scientists were already using this amenity,” says R&D Lab of the Year judge Richard Rietz, Independent Strategic Planner for Labs, Helena, Mont. “Interestingly, I noted that a potential job applicant was taken first to this space to meet staff and not to an office or conference room. That makes quite a statement about the culture that is being fostered at Janelia Farm.”
Janelia Farm’s mission
The Janelia Farm Research Campus is a freestanding research component of HHMI. HHMI is an operating medical research organization, not a foundation, which means that it carries out research with its own employees. By appointing scientists as HHMI investigators—rather than awarding research grants—HHMI is guided by the principle of people, not projects. It believes that science is facilitated best by providing outstanding researchers with the resources and flexibility to follow their scientific instincts and to pursue new opportunities as they arise.
Janelia Farm differs from most free-standing research structures in a number of significant ways. A considerable amount of conference space, including meeting spaces, social spaces, and conference housing, has been included to support a conference and training program and to assure the scientific vitality of a freestanding institution. On-site housing and related amenities are included to support the visiting scientist program. The relationship of site and buildings reflects a concept of buildings that are part of the site, versus structures placed on the site. There are horizontal connections between the interior spaces and the exterior on all floors of the landscape building which houses the laboratory and office spaces. Each floor is essentially at ground level. The research space has been planned to encourage collaboration among small groups through the clustering of offices and the inclusion of larger shared laboratory spaces.
Janelia Farm’s overall objective is to pursue fundamental problems in basic biomedical research that are difficult to approach in academia or industry, because they require expertise from disparate areas, they are too long-term for standard funding mechanisms, or they are outside the current priorities of other funding agencies. HHMI aimed to identify important biomedical problems for which future progress requires technological innovation and then foster the establishment of integrated teams of biologists and tool builders who seek to break through existing barriers. The scientific problems determined will drive the choices of tools to be developed; the software and instrument development activities will work in concert with, and support, the ongoing experimental work of the resident staff and visitors.
The planning for both the scientific program and the campus features of Janelia Farm were intertwined, with each part overlapping and influencing the other. As the campus plan was being refined, Gerry Rubin, the current director of the campus and R&D Magazine’s Scientist of the Year in 2006, began the task of developing a scientific program that would complement and benefit from a setting and organization that could be different from the traditional academic environment. In planning Janelia Farm, Rubin studied the organization, management, and scientific culture of other important research models at both academic and for-profit laboratories, including the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology (MRC LMB) in Cambridge, England, and AT&T’s Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, N.J.
Designing with nature in mind
The labs are inundated with natural light through floor-to-ceiling windows. Photo: Brad Feinknopf
Located along the south bank of the Potomac River about 30 miles upstream from Washington, D.C., the 281-acre site of Janelia Farm was mostly given over to woods, pasture, and two ponds before being selected as the site for the new research campus. Its centerpiece is a Normandy-style farmhouse that was built in 1936; both it and the adjoining carriage house are listed on the National Historic Register. The site slopes from the highpoint of the farmhouse to the Potomac River.
Rafael Viñoly Architects, New York, N.Y., used the natural slope of the site in their plan for the campus. Their plan recreated the landscape and focused the views on the best part of the site. The resulting site plan located a gently curving laboratory building overlooking a new pond and the conference housing structure.
“The architect has shown the value of using nature as an integral part of the design and of the lab experience,” says R&D Lab of the Year judge William Wilson, Principal at Wilson Architects, Boston, Mass.
Janelia Farm includes a landscape laboratory building, conference facilities, conference housing, and a housing village for visiting scientists and students. The architectural designs of the buildings and the laboratories are aimed at achieving Janelia Farm’s central objectives—collaboration and flexibility. The architecture blends the site with the structures, enhancing the concept that they are of the site, not on the site.
“The design effectively accommodates the technical, educational, residential and administrative functions,” says R&D Lab of the Year judge Ron Garikes, Executive VP and COO, Karlsberger Laboratory & Technology Group, Birmingham, Ala.
“The scale of the structures complements the expansive site,” he continues. “The planners and architects created an elegant design solution that also works well from a flow, functionality and aesthetic perspective.”
“The architect and planners spent a great deal of thought and time fitting the research facility and campus to be compatible with the site. The facility flows with the landscape,” agrees R&D Lab of the Year judge Rick Johnson, Director of Strategic Marketing & Corporate Alliances, Thermo Fisher Scientific, Two Rivers, Wisc.
“When a design team can list a lab project above the realm of problem-solving and merge it with an idea, the project raises up to a higher level,” explains Wilson. “Here is an owner who was looking to do this. Here is an open site, and the design team is using a landscape metaphor with a low impact look.”
Encouraging interaction
The housing for conference attendees follows the natural shape of the land. Photo: Brad Feinknopf
The landscape research building is some 274 m long and 82 m deep at the ground floor. In spite of its size, the building blends into the surrounding site. It is stepped up the hill, giving each floor access to landscaped outdoor spaces. The roof is actually landscaped—at 16,723 m2 , it’s the second-largest green roof in the U.S.
“The roof is the ground. Knowing that traditional farms around Washington, D.C. are rapidly being consumed by housing makes this a relevant metaphor for one of our biggest physical problems—the loss of open space,” comments Wilson.
The landscape building is also one of the largest examples in the U.S. of what architects call structurally glazed systems, a technique that supports exceptionally large sheets of glass windows—some 13,657 m2.
“The proximity to the laboratory’s natural surroundings simulates creativity and is conducive to the basis of the mission – life sciences,” says Johnson.
The primary function of the landscape building is to support the research enterprise. The laboratory floors have similar plans, with a clear organization of office, lab, support, and interaction spaces. The building corridor is at the exterior of the building. Office pods are on the outside of the corridor, and lab and support space are on the inside of the corridor. The two center stair spaces are large, allowing easy physical and visual connections between the floors.
The office pods have six offices organized around a center workspace with an end meeting space. The office clusters are designed to house several research groups, and the occupancy of the office clusters can be increased or decreased by changing the furnishings. The separation of the offices from the labs allows them to have a simpler construction and operable windows. The office clusters are located as closely as possible to the lab spaces without being located in the laboratory zone, offering a very close relationship between the offices and lab spaces.
Small gathering and service spaces are located at critical connections between the public corridor, laboratories, and office clusters to foster collaboration and interaction.
“The neighborhoods created by the office clusters and the overall openness should provide a very pleasant and stimulating environment,” says R&D Lab of the Year judge Erik Mollo-Christensen, Principal at Tsoi/Kobus & Associates, Cambridge, Mass.
“I think that Janelia will push others to design more open and flexible-style labs that allow for more interaction,” says Kevin Gilkison, director of ventilation technologies, Labconco Corp., Kansas City, Mo.
“The laboratory space is highly efficient, inundated with natural light, and takes full advantage of the natural beauty of the site,” says Garikes. “The physical environment at this facility will be well received by research-ers and staff who work in the lab. It should also greatly help their retention and recruitment efforts.”
Building flexible labs
Gardens outside the laboratories and principal investigators’ offices on each level enhance the sense that the buildings are of the site, not on the site. Photo: Paul Warchol
The lab spaces are predominantly eight modules wide with removable benchwork systems in the center and fixed sinks and fume hoods on the inside wall. The island lab benches are flexible and removable. Benches consist of un-serviced tables with boxes below. All the service functions—electrical, communications, and vacuum—are accessible from floor-mounted bollards. A laboratory could be configured from one function to another in a matter of hours and without the need for plumbers, carpenters, or electricians.
“Lab casework fed from the floor provides the same functionality and flexibility of typical movable casework systems without the visual clutter of overhead drops,” says Mollo-Christensen.
“All of the service fixtures come up through the floor so that the entire lab could be totally relocated without much trouble,” says Gilkison.
There is an ample amount of general support space adjacent to the labs that is highly flexible, serving a wide range of potential functions. There are specialized support spaces for large or sensitive instrumentation and for future activities that could not be predicted during the design phase.
The second floor has additional support space, including the vivarium holding and procedure rooms and large open lab/support space, located behind the equipment corridor. This arrangement allows users direct access to functions that would be remotely located in a more traditional building. This space is being used for physiology labs, optics labs, robotics functions, specialty microscope spaces, and fly storage and behavior rooms. Other more unusual support space is located on the ground floor with direct access to the loading dock. This space has 11-m-high ceilings and is less subject to vibration.
“The best of the best features from all of the lab projects of the past several decades are distilled into this building: deep modules, reconfigurable lab furniture, office pods, interconnecting corridors and stairwells, glass walls to promote interaction, personnel amenities, multiple seminar venues, integral food service, core laboratories, unprogrammed/unfinished lab space, and exposed mechanical systems,” says Rietz. “I don’t think they missed a concept and they are all executed in a first-class fashion. Janelia Farm is a catalog of all the best lab concepts distilled down into one building. While few, if any, owners will ever have this budget, the building and its laboratories will serve as a standard against which everything else will be measured.”
Fostering community into the future
A series of social gathering spaces for scientists and conferees is located adjacent to the entry and major stair of the landscape building. The spaces include a home theater, games area, living room, science meeting room, and bar and food service area.
Also fostering community is the short-term housing provided for conference attendees and long-term housing provided for visiting scientists working on campus. The two-story building for conference housing lies close to the landscape building. Its 96 rooms can accommodate visitors who come to Janelia Farm for scientific presentations and meetings. Twenty-one studio apartments serve shorter-term single visitors, while 26 two-bedroom apartments and four three-bedroom units with accessible facilities can serve larger groups. In addition, two four-bedroom units can serve graduate students or postdoctoral fellows.
The buildings for visitor housing fit into the existing trees and topography. The center of the site is reserved for pedestrians and open space. The studio units have an adjacent social facility for group gatherings, which serves both the studio units and the apartment units.
“This project is the first real research community developed in the U.S., including labs, housing, and conference space,” says Mollo-Christensen. “Most research buildings are part of a larger university campus, but Janelia has used the resources and land of HHMI to build a working and living environment beyond anything else. Its contribution is at a much larger scale than a lab building alone, and the science it will facilitate sets a new standard for how research entities organize their scientific programs as well as their buildings.”
“I’m impressed with the boldness of the team to recreate the science environment from Bell Laboratories and the Molecular Biology Lab at Cambridge Univ.,” says Rietz. “No one has tried to create a new science environment since the Salk Institute in 1963. Janelia Farm completed all the Salk Institute never finished: top-rate core facilities, world class seminar venue, fellow quarters, guest housing, and total amenities.”
“Janelia will be a magnet for collaboration and innovation for the next 50 years,” says Johnson. “The campus offers all the amenities for discovery—interaction, stimulation, collaboration, and a high quality of life and well-being. When design professionals can listen and understand the basic needs for research and discovery and add sustainability to the mission, the net results will set a new benchmark,” something Janelia Farm has surely done.
—Martha Walz
Vital Stats Project: Howard Hughes Medical Institute Janelia Farm Research Campus, Ashburn, Va. Size: 689 acres, with a 56 ,671 m2 landscape building and 16,723 m2 landscaped roof Budget: Total cost: $430 million including sitework, fees, furnishings, and built-in equipment Architect/Engineer: Rafael Viñoly Architects, New York, N.Y. (lead architecture); Dewberry & Davis, Leesburg, Va. (civil engineering); Thornton Tomasetti Engineers, Newark, N.J. (structural engineering); Kirksey Architecture, Houston, Texas (consulting architect, public spaces); Research Facilities Design, San Diego, Calif. (laboratory consultant); Turner Construction Co., Arlington, Va. (construction); Lab Crafters, Ronkonkoma, N.Y. (laboratory casework, fume hoods, and furniture); Paula Hayes Studio, New York (landscaping). Completion date: Spring 2006
