Attracting the Best
New Facility Positions UTD as Top Research Institution

The $85 million world-class science and engineering facility at UT Dallas, built by Centex and designed by PageSoutherlandPage, hopes to attract some of the world's best minds to Texas.

by Jennifer D. Duell

Rendering courtesy of PageSoutherlandPage

The University of Texas at Dallas is a step closer to achieving its goal of becoming one of the nation's top academic research institutions.

Scheduled for completion in July, the new, $85 million Natural Science and Engineering Research Building will open in time for the fall semester, welcoming nearly 350 faculty, graduate students and postdoctoral researchers from the fields of electrical engineering, material science, chemistry, biology and behavioral and brain sciences.

The four-story, 192,000-sq.-ft. facility on the southeast corner of Synergy Parkway and Rutford Avenue will be the sec-ond-largest building on the UTD campus in Richardson. Situated on the northern end of the campus, it will contain laboratories, a clean room, space for a business "incubator" and other areas dedicated to research.

"The purpose of the building is to attract the best researchers to UTD," said Thomas Lund, resident construction manager for the Office of Facility Planning and Construction for UT System. "The building is the cornerstone of making that happen."

Lund said the building's design and construction was particularly difficult because of the unique skin material and interior mechanical systems. "This is a complex building from inside to outside," he added. "It is not an easy building to build."

Nothing Typical About It From the first day that the building was conceived, it was on a fast-track schedule, Lund said, referring to UTD's commitment to have the facility ready by the end of 2006. With Dallas-based PageSoutherlandPage serving as the principal architect, the facility's design received approval in just four months, setting a record in the UT System, said PSP vice president Dee Maxey.

Dallas-based Centex Construction Corp., the general contractor, broke ground on the building in November 2003.

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"The university requested a building that was state-of-the-art and world class from an architectural and mechanical point of view," Maxey said. PSP brought in two design consultants: Los Angeles-based Zimmer Gunsel Frasca Partnership assisted with the architectural design; Irvine, Calif.-based GPR Planners Collaborative handled the laboratory design.

Since the new science and engineering building has a prominent position on the campus, it needed to be a significant architectural element, Maxey said.

With two rectangular sides, two curved sides and a roof that slopes in two different directions, the building defies description as either modern or traditional. "It's an entirely new category: timeless design," Maxey said.

The building's exterior incorporates a mix of several different materials. "It's an average size building, but the design is what's unique," Lund said. "Specifically, the exterior cladding is not like anything that has been built in Dallas or even in Texas."

The primary exterior material, Rimex, is an anodized stainless steel product that is manufactured near London, England. "We've had anodized aluminum here in the U.S., but Rimex is a fairly new product," Lund said, adding that Rimex had been used for buildings at the University of California and University of Arizona in Tucson. "Rimex gives the building a 'wow' factor."

The 12-in. square Rimex shingles on the building are a shade of green, but when the sunlight hits them, they transition from green to blue to dark burgundy. They are hung in a diamond pattern to overlap each other, making the curved wall undulate. Moreover, the glass curtain wall is designed in a sawtooth, faceted pattern. "There's nothing typical about the look of the building," Lund said.

Because of the unique skin material and interior mechanical systems, construction of the building was neither easy nor typical for general contractor Centex Construction. (Photo courtesy of the University of Texas at Dallas.)

Worth Every Penny

There was not nothing typical about the construction of the building, said Juan Rodriguez, senior project manager for Centex. The roof design, in particular, required extensive time and energy, as did the interior. "We had to pay a lot of attention to laboratory spaces and the research spaces because of the cooling and heating systems that are required for the lab casework," Rodriquez said. Additionally, the clean-room spaces required advanced filtration systems.

The interior of the facility is laid out with modern research trends in mind, Maxey said. For example, team members representing different science and engineering specialties will be able to work together because the design blends all the disciplines.

"It's the first time this has been done," he said. He added that the design focuses on the lowest common denominator of what all researchers need.

Integrating all of the facility's unique exterior and interior elements was a challenge to everyone involved, primarily because of budget. "We had a fixed, finite budget, and the goals of the university many times exceeded the budget," Maxey said.

The building’s exterior incorporates a mix of several different materials including Rimex shingles that transition from green to blue to dark burgundy when hit by sunlight. (Photo courtesy the University of Texas at Dallas.)

In fact, the construction costs were one of the biggest surprises, Rodriguez said. "We had to work closely with the design team to bring the project within budget," he said.

The new facility is funded by a $300 million grant to expand and improve UTD's Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science. Roughly $50 million has come from the Texas Enterprise Fund, which provides economic-development monies to encourage companies to do business in the Lone Star State.

Built in partnership with Texas Instruments, the building is just one of three UTD facilities that will be used to bulk up its research from $33 million per year to $100 million. The university also has purchased and is renovating two existing buildings to house UTD's Center for BrainHealth and offices and research laboratories of some faculty and staff from the School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics.

Together, the three buildings will add more than 300,000 sq. ft. of research space to UTD in the next two years. But, the new Science and Engineering building will certainly be the most important. "It's going to be an architecturally unique, world-class facility," Rodriguez said.

Together, the three buildings will add more than 300,000 sq. ft. of research space to UTD in the next two years. But, the new Science and Engineering building will certainly be the most important. "It's going to be an architecturally unique, world-class facility," Rodriguez said.