3 0 | L E H I G H B U L L E T I N views between floors, ensuring the entire space feels open, yet connected. The minimalist gray-and-white interior is accented with contemporary couches and lounge chairs in shades of lemon and lime, with an occasional pop of primary color. The welcoming spaces are set up around the perimeter of the building with faculty offices in the center, a strategic design that ensures professors will be among their students as soon as they step outside their offices. “There will be lots of interactions, lots of engagement between facultymembers, students and research staff,” Urban said. “The structure of the building is designed to foster these interactions with labs that are very open. Even walking upstairs can be a barrier in some buildings, but the way HST was designed was to invite people to see what’s happening on each floor, to easilymove between spaces.” At nightfall, “Lehigh” is illuminated in LED lights at the top of the building, a 60-foot-by-10-foot beacon visible fromvarious vantage points across the city. The café on the first level has a “green roof” overtop where native plants sprout, and the upper windows with western and southern exposure have solar shades thatmimic themicroscopic image of a cell. It’s all very modern with lots of metal and glass, but the entranceway doors, Project Manager Joe Klocek ’98, pointed out, are wood. That design decision was a nod to Lehigh’s oldest buildings, which also feature heavy wood doors. Designing Lehigh’s Newest Research Facility HST was designed by HGA, a national interdisciplinary design firm. Throughout the academic world, there’s a growing idea that buildings should no longer be department-specific, but interdisciplinary, said Bill Wilson, an architect and principal with HGA’s science and technology division in Boston. “In the design profession, the spaces we are trying to guide clients to use are generic spaces that can be reassigned to anticipate unknown change. You can call that flexibility, but also sustainability or resilience,” Wilson said. “We are looking at three to four generations of faculty who will be doing things here that were undreamed of at the outset of the building. It needs to be very robust so that it can adapt itself to a lot of different arrangements and equipment.” HST was designed to have large, open spaces that can easily be reconfigured. The labs feature moveable tables with overhead gas lines that can accommodate almost any arrangement. The building is targeting LEED Gold Certification by the U.S. GreenBuilding Council. It also earned a Fitwel Certification given to buildings that emphasize public health through measures such as walkability, access to natural daylight, indoor air quality and offering healthy food options. The overall building is designed and constructed to minimize vibrations. One particular area in the basement, which Wilson called “the bathtub,” is especially important to Lehigh’s high-performance microscopy work. The room is built extra tall and deep with three feet of concrete flooring resting over floating blocks that significantlyminimize disruptions from the outside world. “The reason for this is that the resolution of research has increasingly become tighter and tighter,”Wilson said. “That’s why our devices are getting smaller and smaller,” he said, holding up his smartphone. The space is quiet enough that researchers can examine particles down to five nanometers of resolution. For comparison, a piece of paper is 10,000 nanometers thick, according to the National Nanotechnology Initiative. Lehigh first considered a new interdisciplinary building during the 2015-2016 academic year, following a study of the university’s research infrastructure. “We had done an assessment of our facilities and a lot of them are aging, but they also weren’t conducive to interdisciplinary work,” said Brent Stringfellow, who had served as Lehigh’s University Architect. In the older buildings on the Lehigh campus, each researcher is assigned a room off a hallway and those rooms are walled off, concealing what’s going on inside, Stringfellow said. At HST, in contrast, the labs are open spaces surrounded by glass. And alTRANSPARENCY A student walking past one of the many open labs. Glass walls provide a look at work going on inside.
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