Project Details
- Project Name
- University of Washington, Life Sciences Building
- Client/Owner
- University of Washington
- Project Types
- Education
- Project Scope
- New Construction
- Size
- 207,000 sq. feet
- Year Completed
- 2018
- Awards
- 2023 AIA Architecture Award 2023
- Shared by
- Madeleine D'Angelo
- Project Status
- Built
- Cost
- $146,000,000
This project was selected as a winner in AIA's 2023 Architecture Awards.
Part high-tech laboratory, part sustainability experiment, and part grown-up treehouse, Perkins&Will’s recently completed Life Sciences Building at the University of Washington’s Seattle campus is an unlikely hybrid that works as a seamless whole. The project’s complex program stacks social, educational, and technological functions in a series of discrete layers allowing for sophisticated systems of air circulation, thermal management, and energy efficiency throughout the volume.
The design team also displayed careful consideration of the human element; with meeting spaces and outdoor terraces immediately accessible from labs, offices, and classrooms, every aspect of the design serves to turn the building into one giant tool for advancing biological pedagogy and research. Perhaps even more important, the building itself, in its organic materiality and gemlike clarity, communicates its ecological objectives and values to the broader academic community. Surrounded by dense cedar forest, the building blends into its woody environs, becoming a part of the very natural processes that its users seek to study and to save.
PROJECT CREDITS
Project: University of Washington, Life Sciences Building, Seattle.
Architect: Perkins&Will. Anthony Gianopoulos (Managing Principal), Andy Clinch (Project Manager/Designer), Devin Kleiner (Project Architect), Shanni Hanein (Job Captain)
Client Team: Major Capital Projects; College of Arts and Sciences; Department of Biology; Office of University Architect General
Contractor: Skanska USA
Electrical Contractor: VECA Electric
Structural and Civil Engineer: Coughlin Porter Lundeen
Mechanical and Electrical Engineer: Affiliated Engineers, Inc.
Landscape Architect: Gustafson Guthrie Nichol
Lighting Design: Blanca Lighting
Mechanical Contractor: McKinstry
This article first appeared in the May/June 2023 issue of ARCHITECT.
Project Description
This project was a winner in the 2021 AIA COTE Top Ten Awards.
FROM AIA:
More than one third of all students at the University of Washington take courses in Biology, the University’s largest department and the largest STEM program in the entire state. The Department of Biology, needed a new facility to meet its growing demands all while embodying the school’s core values of scientific discovery, innovation, collaboration, active learning, public education and environmental sustainability. The completed state-of-the-art building elevates the Department of Biology and UW into the next generation of research, teaching and environmental stewardship.
The Life Sciences Building (LSB) simulates an “ecotone”—the transition region between two biological communities. In both program and design, the technology behind LSB’s science and research intersects with the study of the natural world. At 207,000 square feet, LSB combines energy-efficient technologies with natural materials found in the Pacific Northwest, bringing the outside inward and placing education on display. To enhance the building’s relationship to the campus, students, faculty and environment, LSB embraces three core concepts—Science as a Gateway, Connections, and Engagement.
With these concepts in mind, the design team planned open, flexible, and efficient teaching and research spaces, maximizing opportunities for collaboration. The central stair’s generous landings and breakout spaces create synergy between students, faculty, and researchers for sharing knowledge. A greenhouse located near Seattle’s largest pedestrian trail encourages the community to engage with the University and discover the science happening within. Innovative solar glass fins put science on display while generating enough electricity to light all of offices year-round helping achieve LEED Gold and the AIA 2030 Challenge.
Much more than a building, LSB provides the foundation for innovative and collaborative cutting-edge research on climate change. It acts as a hub for student discovery, transforming the way we teach and how the next generation of scientists learn with sustainability at the core.