The location of a $180 million laboratory building under construction on the University of Chicago campus impacted its design and construction.

The Interdivisional Research Building, or IRB, will house laboratories for experiments in the natural sciences, and land is limited in the west-central area of the Hyde Park campus where science buildings are concentrated.

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Dwight Blake, vice president of Schaumburg, Ill.-based Power Construction Co. LLC, a member of IRB Construction Partners construction management team, said three antiquated buildings were demolished to make room.

The design parameters called for paralleling the scale of nearby facilities, many of them academic and residential structures with a modest height. But the IRB needed to house a large number of laboratories due to the multiple research disciplines planned for the building. A key decision was to put five floors above grade and two floors below so that the building would not exceed the neighborhood's height proportions.

Robert Holliday, the university's director of facility services, said the 480,000-sq.-ft. IRB will be the campus' biggest science building and the second largest structure overall after the Joseph Regenstein Library.

Other design elements ensure the IRB makes a good addition to the science area of Hyde Park.

For instance, most of the building will be dressed in Indiana limestone, a prominent material on buildings in the area and throughout the campus. And, the IRB's U-shape will wrap three sides of the John Crerar Library.

"It's a mature campus," Blake added. "Site selection is at a premium, so they had to shoehorn this building in."

Sitework Steps

Construction on the IRB began in October 2002 and is expected to be complete in fall 2005.

The decision to put levels below grade resulted in a careful sequence during the early sitework and excavation.

Ensuring the building's stability was critical because the foundation's deepest point reaches 50 ft. below grade, or 30 ft. below the water table, Blake said. Lake Michigan is about a mile to the east.

"The site was a lakebed at one time, so the ground water comes in directly from the lake," he added.

Slurry, a mixture of water and clay material, was used to form the perimeter walls to make them impermeable in the high-water-table area.

Parallel guide walls were nailed into the ground, and the dirt between them was excavated with a clamshell bucket. The slurry was pumped in, and previously fabricated rebar cages were inserted.

Concrete was poured in, and the slurry came out and was captured for reuse on future perimeter segments.

"We worked through the winter, and it was a challenge to keep the slurry from freezing," Blake said. The storage tank that held the slurry was heated between pours.

In total, 97 slurry wall segments make up the perimeter. Dirt that was made up of beach sand and silty clay was removed inside the perimeter, and 11,000 truck trips were required for removal.

The design also employed an earth-retention system that uses tiebacks, or tendons, to keep the foundation rigid. Spin-off benefits include ensuring against the settlement of adjacent streets or buildings.

Drills were brought in to bore holes through the perimeter walls, and the tiebacks were inserted, pressure-grouted and tensioned. In total, 873 tiebacks were installed at three depths under 57th and Drexel streets and the Crerar library.

Precision was important. Imbed plates on the rebar cages installed early on, for instance, were to be placed correctly.

The interior concrete in front of the plates was removed, and the structural steel inside the perimeter was welded to the plates. About 6,500 steel pieces go into the building.

"After the structural steel is in place, it is the retention system for the slurry wall," Blake said. "Then we had to come back and de-tension all the ties."

IRB's ABCs

The university hopes the IRB will help it stay competitive in advanced research.

The school on the city's South Side can boast 39 Nobel Laureates in physics and chemistry, yet the quality of the research facilities needs improvement, said the university's Holliday.

"The university has really been lagging our peers as far as building laboratory space," he added.

Since World War II, only two comparatively small laboratory facilities - a biological sciences center and biopsychology facility - have been built on the campus that is famous in part because of its devotion to research.

A goal that emerged during planning for the IRB was to encourage interdisciplinary research among scientists from traditionally separate academic backgrounds.

"The sciences started with basic concepts and branched out," Holliday said. "Now, at the submolecular level, the sciences are beginning to come back together, both from a physical and biological sciences point of view."

The facility will provide laboratories and offices for the Physical Sciences Division and the Biological Sciences Division, as well as other academic units such as the James Franck Institute and Chemistry Department.

An atrium at the center of the three-wing facility was incorporated to encourage interaction among scientists. The IRB will house 100 primary researchers and be used by about 700 laboratory assistants and students.

The facility will be the cornerstone of a science quadrangle, running on the south side of 57th Street from Ellis to Drexel avenues.

In addition to limestone, the building will feature some curtain wall and metal panel, elements that give it a progressive look, McDonough said.

"Even though (the IRB) fits in architecturally with the 75- and 100-year-old buildings in the neighborhood, it looks like a 21st Century building with the glass and aluminum on it," he added.

Heavy Equipment Needs

Equipping the IRB was complex.

Scientists with wide-ranging research pursuits will use the building, said Pat McDonough, site architect for Cambridge, Mass.-based Ellenzweig Associates Inc., the designer. For instance, laboratories will include those for research in cryogenics, lasers, chemistry and biology.

"In the biosciences area, you will notice the laboratories are very similar," he said. "But in the physical sciences side, almost every laboratory is different due to the nature of the equipment and the type of research these individuals are doing."

Mock-ups were built for different laboratories, and university researchers toured them to provide feedback. For the laser laboratories, they suggested isolating the lasers' power feeds from those used for other things because of lasers' heavy energy requirements.

Because of the sensitivity of some instruments, anti-vibration elements were incorporated, McDonough said. These included thickening the floor slabs and steel members in the areas to be used for physical sciences and installing vibration isolators where needed.

Bridge cranes - mechanisms on tracks with cables and hooks to pick things - were put in the underground space's ceilings so that research instruments, many of them heavy, can be installed where they are needed and moved around.

About 211 fume hoods that provide independent exhaust for the laboratories are in the building, IRB Construction Partners' Blake said.