Vivarium Design,Walls and Ceilings

At a new 222,000 square foot vivarium in the southern United States, planning, design, and engineering strategies were integrated to create a flexible office and research facility. The design concepts and solutions developed for this confidential client can be applied to capitalize on vivarium design flexibility. Here, effective facility planning maximized the configuration and adjacencies of holding rooms and procedure rooms, and innovative design techniques were applied to engineering support systems to optimize environmental conditions regardless of room variables.

Functions and Relationships in the Programming Phase
Flexibility is one of the most common design drivers for programming a vivarium. Today’s biological facilities are investing in laboratories that accommodate current and future species research. A common programming mistake is limiting the flexibility to the design of the holding room. While it is true that the holding room is the basic unit of the vivarium, consideration must be given to all programmatic functions of the vivarium to ensure maximum flexibility. A good facility planning exercise addresses program functions such as holding rooms, ante rooms, and procedure rooms, and more impor tantly, how these functions relate to one another.

There are several models that can be used as concept diagrams for programming a facility. The parti shown in the adjacency diagram in Figure 1 locates the holding rooms in the middle of the facility, with the procedure rooms, offices, building support, and special procedure rooms located along the perimeter. This model’s zoned programming approach clearly defines spaces to improve circulation and efficiency throughout the facility.

The optimum floor plan in this scenario closely follows the adjacency diagram where, as the floor plan in Figure 2 illustrates, the core of holding rooms is surrounded by a racetrack of corridors that access the balance of the facility. For this project, the central location of the holding rooms enables both researchers and support staff to easily access species without interrupting ongoing procedures. Spaces unique to the organization, like dark rooms or special environment chambers, were located to minimize impact of the surrounding rooms.

Flexible Options in Facility Programming
Where the adjacency diagram addresses flexibility from an overall facility planning perspective, the individual program components also need to maximize flexibility on a smaller scale (Figure 3).