The LEED Gold certified, 225,000 square foot BC Cancer Research Facility includes 8 specialty laboratories, among them the Genome Sequence Center – Canada’s first gene science lab dedicated to cancer research. The site, across from the BC Cancer Agency, was constructed in two phases, with the first building constructed in its entirety before work on the second building was undertaken.
The challenges presented by this new facility were multi-dimensional. The requirements and requests of the various project stakeholders coalesced into the desire to design and build a research facility that not only gathers many different research teams from within the agency and drawing the world’s leading scientific minds to the center, but is also able to adapt to the future innovation and needs of both the individual researchers and the community as a whole.
To ensure that this structure was able to meet the specific goals and requirements set out for it, Glotman•Simpson used a reinforced concrete structure coupled with a structural steel interstitial space. Before selecting this system, we provided over 8 different options of various structural schemes for value analysis of each system. There was a critical concern that the vivarium within the facility has a particular sensitivity to the vibration of the structure, which our firm worked closely with lab specialists to mitigate.