Two LMN Architects-designed academic science buildings move forward for completion next year

Building Teams that include designer LMN Architects are on pace to complete two new science labs at Washington State in Pullman and Eastern Washington University in Cheney by the fall of 2020.

The 80,300-sf five-story Plant Sciences Building at Washington State integrates several disciplines from the College of Agriculture, Human and Natural Resources. It also provides new infrastructure for the Institute of Biological Chemistry, along with labs that bring together faculty and students in plant biochemistry, pathology, horticulture, and crop-and-soil sciences into one facility.

This L-shaped building, which should be completed by October, is the fourth within a master plan for the university’s Research and Education complex, which LMN originally designed back in 2005. The new facility will be the social and interdisciplinary hub of the complex, and has been designed for flexibility to meet the university’s future needs, including an interior arrangement of modular lab spaces that can support research over time.

The exterior of the building features a high-performance concrete façade panel system clad in red-brick veneer.

At Eastern Washington University, the new 102,700-sf Interdisciplinary Science Center for physics, chemistry, biology, and geology will be connected to an existing Science Building Center by two enclosed pedestrian bridges.

The four-level Interdisciplnary Science Center at Eastern Washington University will connect with an existing Science Building Center.

Inside the building, laboratory instrument exhibits and educational displays are integrated along its central corridor walls. Outside the building, the landscape design was crafted in close collaboration between the design team and teaching faculty, and features significant local geologic specimens along site walls and native plant species arrayed among the building’s various micro-climates.

This four-level building, too, is clad with a panelized red-brick façade system, accentuated with a subtle mix of cascading glazed surfaces. Inside, labs flank either side of corridors on all floors. A lecture hall on level 1 is positioned into the building’s sloping site and forms a terminus of that level in the hillside.

Sustainable strategies include low-flow fume hoods and heat recovery pipes, rainwater harvesting, xeriscaping and inclusion of botanical and geological landscape elements that serve as teaching tools. The building is targeting LEED Gold certification.

The Plant Sciences Building’s design and construction team includes LMN Architects (architect), Coughlin Porter Lundeen (CE), Skanska USA Building (GC and CM), Berger Partnership (landscape architect), MW Consulting Engineers (MEP, lighting design), and Magnusson Klemencic Associates (SE).

The same Building Team is working on the Interdisciplinary Science Center with the exception of Lydig Construction providing GC and CM services.