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Emergency standby backup power system for the new Science and Engineering Hall at the George Washington University in Washington, DC
Spanning a city block, the 750,000 SF Science and Engineering Hall (SEH) is the largest academic building of its kind in Washington, DC and the first new major laboratory building on the campus in over 50 years. The building brings together research and teaching spaces previously spread across a dozen buildings, and nearly doubles the space on campus available to a variety of science and engineering programs.
To encourage interdisciplinary partnerships, departments are arranged in “research neighborhoods” that place laboratories and office space for different disciplines next to each other around a collaboration space, pantry, and spiral stair. Spaces for gathering and interaction can be found throughout the building in varying scales: internal gardens highlighted by green walls, informal group spaces, a large commons area, meeting and study rooms.
The building, known on campus as the SEH, provides eight floors of laboratory space to support both academics and research. Students in the School of Engineering and Applied Science and the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences will study and work in a variety of facilities on the two floors below grade and six floors above, including a nanofabrication lab and an imaging suite.
In the three-story “high bay,” students will test how to make buildings and bridges more earthquake-resistant.
The seventh and eighth floors will house the Milken Institute School of Public Health and the School of Medicine and Health Sciences. A greenhouse will be added to the roof when that stage of the project is completed in 2016, Korman says.
Another highlight is the “teaching tower,” a five-story stack of 1,000-square-foot labs in the center of the building. Software engineering, circuitry and robotics, among other subjects, will be taught in the labs, which are enclosed by glass on three sides.
