AECOM Tishman served as construction manager for a confidential long-term client on the four-story interior fit-out of state-of-the-art research facilities in 120,000 square feet of leased space, home to 450 faculty, staff and students, at the Center for Life Science West Tower.
The laboratory program consisted of approximately 60,000 square feet of wet lab, a dry computation lab, an isolation (germ-free) suite, an automation lab, a 5,000-square-foot ABSL-3 lab, and support, seminar, and private investigator office space. In addition, a 20,000-square-foot vivarium was constructed to house a central cage-wash facility with a fully automated bottle-washing line, surgery suite, and holding space.
The project’s infrastructure component included the addition of isolation suite programs as well as the construction of three new mechanical equipment rooms, along with new risers connecting them, to serve the intense laboratory and ABSL-3 MEP requirements of the four floors. AECOM Tishman structurally reinforced and reconfigured the roof, adding 56 tons of roof dunnage steel to accommodate the program’s extensive HVAC requirements.
BIM helped coordinate the physical locations and pathways of all MEP equipment within the building structure – it greatly aided in avoiding field clashes between architectural and MEP components. Variable air volume boxes, data cable trays, lighting controls, various plumbing and HVAC isolation valves, and building management system panels were all neatly arranged in 3D, and using the BIM model, AECOM Tishman could show the construction trades how we intended to build the job in progressive stages. BIM also allowed the construction team to clearly map access to all above-ceiling equipment for service by the client’s maintenance staff, limiting disruption of laboratory activities.