The latest piece of a life-sciences development cluster is swiftly taking shape on a tight site alongside the downtown Indianapolis canal.

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The $42 million Indiana University Medical Information Sciences Building will group under one roof several research-oriented offices currently located on the nearby Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis campus.

Civic and business leaders view the north end of the scenic canal - about a mile north of the downtown center - as a magnet for the life-sciences activity they hope to encourage in central Indiana.

Already in place across the canal and just to the south is the IU Emerging Technologies Center, a business incubator for life-sciences, biotechnology and bioinformatics companies. Directly to the north and soon to open is a centralized Clarian Health Partners medical laboratory facility; Clarian is a health provider.

Also overlooking the canal's north basin is a monorail station along Clarian's 1.5-mi. People Mover line, which links the health-care network's Methodist Hospital with its two hospitals on the IUPUI campus.

"We're providing about 167,000 sq. ft. of space for multiple programs at the IU School of Medicine," said Rich Thompson, associate university architect. Grouped together to improve collaboration will be IU's children's health services research; computational biology and bioinformatics; division of biostatistics; adolescent medicine; molecular genetics; center for bioethics; and the Regenstrief Institute, a research organization.

"All of those groups are associated in their research efforts and have ties to each other, but they're scattered all over the campus now," Thompson added.

Oh, What a Site

IU obtained the canal-side site from the city of Indianapolis, which had used it to stable horses for its mounted-police patrols. In exchange for the site, the university traded the off-campus property that formerly housed its Herron School of Art. The construction site offers little room to spare, bounded by 11th Street on the north, 10th Street on the south, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Street on the west and the canal on the east.

The tightness of the site has been the primary problem facing general contractor F.A. Wilhelm Construction Co. of Indianapolis.

"There's really only room for a small road to go around; there's no lay-down area," said Wilhelm project manager Mike Kinton. "We used a tower crane and had to schedule deliveries to arrive when we could put them on the building instead of storing them onsite."

Orchestrating the mechanical-electrical-plumbing contractors also was an exercise in careful planning, and Kinton said this project mixes an especially wide variety of materials and finishes, both outside and in. Ceilings, for example, range from wood panels to perforated metal and other acoustic installations.

The canal - which is surrounded by residential and commercial development and attracts walkers, runners, pedal-boaters and an occasional gondola excursion - is down a small slope from the construction site. Despite the building's proximity to the canal, Kinton said earth retention was not required.

Construction began in December 2004 and is to be completed by this December.

"It's a pretty aggressive schedule," Kinton said. "We started to work in the winter and had some winter weather issues that we had to deal with."

Because the property is so small, little onsite parking will be available when the building is complete.

Thompson said that's not a concern because many of the building's users will choose to park on the IUPUI campus and take the monorail to the nearby canal station. Also, the master plan for the canal-based life-sciences cluster anticipates eventual construction of a parking garage nearby, on the opposite side of the canal.

Kinton said the Medical Information Sciences Building has a concrete frame, with brick, stone, curtain wall and metal panels on the exterior.

It is divided into two wings - a north section with a basement, five above-grade levels and penthouse and a south section that rises three levels. A two-story glass lobby space joins the sections and overlooks the canal basin, but users on the second and third levels also may pass between the two sections without having to return to the lobby.

Signaling a New Building

Architects included a tower rising from the north section, roughly in the middle of the development, said Chris Boyer, project architect for New York-based Beyer Blinder Belle Architects and Planners. It extends two stories above the top occupied level - one level above the mechanical penthouse - and is to be topped with a flagpole.

"It becomes a beacon and marks the entry into the building," he added.

A challenge facing the architects was the variance in canal-area land uses. Just across the street to the north is the modern, six-story Clarian laboratory building, but across the street to the south are lower-rise, canal-side residential buildings.

That's the rationale behind dividing the Medical Information Sciences Building into two visually distinct sections, Boyer said.

"To the north is a higher-scale building and we wanted to reflect that," he said. But the architects didn't want to create a jarring shift between a higher-rise and the shorter residential buildings to the south, "so we wanted to step down."

Thompson added, "It cascades down to the south" so that it would "not create a sheer, urban wall up to our neighbors."

The use of multiple exterior treatments accentuates the visual differences.

The ground level is sided all around in limestone, while levels two and three of both sections are clad on the canal side with what Boyer calls an oatmeal-colored brick.

More traditional red brick is used on the upper levels of the north section on the canal side. On the street side, above the limestone-clad ground level, the north section is all red brick while the south end uses all oatmeal-colored brick.

As a result, the development appears from the street side to be two distinct buildings, while on the canal side there is a more uniform look.

Thompson said the two brick tones are representative of the players involved in the canal-side developments, with the red brick linked to the nearby IUPUI campus and the tan-colored brick similar to what's used at Clarian's nearby Methodist Hospital.

Though the new building will be the site of a wide range of medical-related research, it did not pose the kind of design and construction challenges often associated with medical-research facilities, Thompson said. That's because the research housed there will be mostly computation in nature; there will be no wet labs.

The building, therefore, is simply wired with a typical university computer network linked to the IUPUI campus.

In addition to offices and research areas, the building will include conference facilities, a seminar room and a variety of collaborative space. There also will be space reserved for as-yet-undetermined retail tenants that will serve building occupants as well as foot traffic from the canal.

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