Cooke-Hochstetter Hall Renovation

May 24

Research facility gets the flexibility and collaboration spaces it needs.

The renovation of the 5th floor of Cooke & Hochstetter Halls creates a state of the art research facility for the biology and geology graduate students, postdoc and faculty. This 39,450 gross square feet gut renovation and building system replacement project redesigns the 1971 space for new labs, offices, meeting spaces and associated support space. Coupled with the reprogramming efforts and visioning, the design process determined key project goals including to design efficient lab environments to support the rest of the building and to last 40 years; to design for change and growth, with flexibility and adaptability; sophisticated system design with ‘simple’ interface and operation; and to invest wisely by predicting the construction costs in local markets.

With a focus on flexibility for adapting the changes in research subjects and faculty and an ability to promote collaborative interaction between occupants for the intellectual exchanges of research and academic ideas, the design and space distribution was based around a gradient from “public” to “private”.

Locating faculty offices along the primary circulation path linking the elevator cores, undergraduate students have a clear path to visit faculty members. Access to the labs and adjacent support spaces branches from the “lab corridor”, denoting the change in program, leading to the “collaborative corridor” where researchers have access to various environments to support the daily range of collaboration, research, and innovation.