Barry Parks authored the building design and led a team of architects, engineers, and interior designers at this 161,500 sf research facility for the School of Medicine at UNC – Chapel Hill. It completed in 1994 at a cost of approximately $26 million. With two significant donor families, the goal was to design a single lab building with two distinct entries.
The seven story building provides five floors of modular dedicated research laboratory space supporting three distinct research programs. The lower floor houses administrative offices for one of those programs as well as the animal holding facility and a loading dock to service the building. The second floor is given over to mechanical support and a student cafeteria. The third floor holds a mix of laboratories and offices in one portion of the building and administrative offices in the other half.
The upper four floors feature offices, research laboratories, shared laboratory support units in a modular arrangement, and mechanical chases. A cross-campus circulation route was incorporated into the design and the below grade animal holding area is decked with an exterior patio.
