SCUP Poster Forum: Programming and Design of High-Performance Teaching Laboratories

Submitted by Andrea Feniak, Senior Associate (Washington, DC)

For another of Stantec’s poster sessions at the SCUP conference, we’re showcasing Montgomery College’s New Science Center on the Rockville, Maryland campus. One of the reasons we chose to highlight this project is it represents a design approach that engaged everyone—the owner, stakeholders and the architect/engineer design team—in the development of an educational program that truly embraced the idea that a lab building could be high-performing while low-energy and sustainable. As a team, we made sure the program was integrated with the systems right from the beginning through open communication at workshops with stakeholders that established goals, collected data, and determined needs and concepts.

As a result, we have a successful academic laboratory program that balances educational needs with energy performance, in part because we were able to engage the educational users beyond the programming process to determine how the educational requirements of laboratories can influence sustainable design decisions. We also used life-cycle cost analysis as an important decision-making tool during design, and whole-building commissioning during construction.

The SCUP poster session allows participants to comment on posters using Post-It Notes. We’re asking SCUP conference attendees to specifically provide some input on the following questions:

1. How can the programming workshop for a successful educational laboratory influence sustainable design decisions?
2. How do the methods for the design, construction, and operation of buildings contribute to an energy efficient teaching laboratory?

And if you aren’t attending SCUP, we certainly invite comments here from our online community as well. Thanks!