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Above:The
Donald Danforth Plant Science Center is one of the world’s largest
and most advanced research facilities devoted to basic plant science
research.
Growing
Plant and Life Science
The state-of-the-art Donald Danforth Plant Science Center recently
opened to great expectations.
By Peter Downs
It
“will have global significance in the best possible cause: to
feed the world,” says former United States Senator John Danforth,
chairman of the Danforth Foundation that helped fund the center.
It is also “crucial to the future of this region,” he adds.
“The Donald Danforth Plant Science Center will ensure that Missouri
is at the center of this century’s revolution,” says Sen. Christopher
“Kit” Bond. “It will draw high-paying jobs and talent to the region.”
Robert Calcaterra, chief executive of the Nidus Center for Scientific
Enterprise, calls the new Donald Danforth Plant Science Center
the foundation of efforts to make metropolitan St. Louis one of
the top locations in the world for life sciences, the center of
the BioBelt. He expects research at the center will yield commercial
products, and start-up companies to make them, that in coming
years will help drive the region’s economy forward.
Hendrik Verfaillie, president and chief executive officer of Monsanto
Company, agrees, and says it will benefit established St. Louis
companies, too. “The Danforth Plant Science Center is a catalyst
for St. Louis becoming the Silicon Valley of life sciences to
feed population and create entire new uses for crop plants. It
will help attract global talent to St. Louis, which companies
like Monsanto need.”
Of course, St. Louis was already a major center of life sciences,
says William Danforth, chairman of the board of trustees of the
Danforth Plant Sciences Center, but to become a leader, “we needed
a building.”
That’s a lot of weight to put on a building, but this one bears
it grandly. Its architectural design is recognized as having the
potential to contribute at a high level to the success of the
center as a research facility and as a visible international symbol
for excellence in this field.
The laboratory space consists of 15 flexible/open plant biotechnology
laboratories with associated support spaces with flexible fit
outs. All tissue culture and Biosafety areas are consolidated
in a single lab. Bioinformatics laboratories include the largest
computer array dedicated to plant biology in the world: 1,040
linked Pentium III processors. The 15,000-square-foot greenhouse
includes 14 rooms and a work area, including two air-conditioned
areas. The head house, which supports the greenhouse, includes
19 walk-in plant growth rooms, 38 reach-in plant growth chambers
and a soil mixing area. The Center’s research space also includes
suites for x-ray crystallography, mass spectrometry and electron
microscopy.
The environmentally-controlled growth rooms and growth chambers,
the likes of which are found nowhere else in the U.S., are equipped
with a unique lighting system that, for the first time, allows
researchers in the U.S. to accurately control the amount of light
plants receive, which will help determine how modified plants
will fare in different climates.
A prestigious research center is more than laboratories, however.
The design must encourage communication and collaboration between
scientists in different laboratories. To help recruit scientists
from around the world it must be welcoming to people from different
cultures, and it must reflect the elegance and sophistication
that are a hallmark of aspirations to be the best.
The Danforth Center does all of that. A three-story atrium provides
a dramatic, sunlit, plant filled central circulation and casual
meeting center. This space opens at the building front to a sun-screened
south facing lobby/exhibition space, which displays the scientists’
work at the center and worldwide. The rear of the atrium opens to
a planted roof deck overlooking the greenhouses and the 40-acre
site. A separate chemical storage building and site and building
maintenance facility are provided adjacent to the building.
These informal meeting spaces encourage communication, collaboration,
and creativity including seating areas in the atrium and on the
roof deck, a faculty lounge, a library, conference and coffee bar
spaces on each of the four floors, and the open, flexible seating
areas in the dining/prefunction space, adjacent to the 302-seat
auditorium and the dining area. A story-high fountain and water
wall provides sound masking and focus for this large space.
Ultimately, the $75 million research center will house 17 principal
investigators—currently it has 11—and more than 200 scientists,
technicians, post-doctoral researchers and graduate students, making
it one of the world’s largest and most advanced research facilities
devoted to basic plant science research.
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A
World-Class Research Faciity
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The innovative
Donald Danforth Plant Science Center is a building of international
significance, both in its mission and its design, and the
design reflects the mission.
The Danforth Plant Science Center is a collaborative project
to combine science and nature for the benefit of the international
community—to better understand plant biology in order to improve
the nutrition and health of the world’s people in a way that
sustains the environment.
According to the London, England-based design architects Nicholas
Grimshaw & Partners Limited, the combination of natural building
elements such as terra cotta with technological elements like
machined aluminum reflects the mission of having science complement
nature. The international design competition to select a design
architect, and the use of building materials from around the
world, reflect the Center’s international orientation. And
the design of the facility’s research spaces and services
to encourage informal communication and interaction between
researchers reflects the social and collaborative nature of
scientific research, says Mark Husser, project director for
the technical architect, HOK.
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Unlike many research facilities, this one is meant to be open to
the public, with educational spaces for introducing the public to
the research through slide presentations and lectures.
The central atrium is a fully accessible, three-story high public
space enclosed by a sky lit roof and glass walls on either end to
create a light and airy internal garden. It stands above the ground
and basement levels in order to maintain public access to the main
space while special events are taking place in the conference rooms
or auditorium below. Environmental sustainability—and energy conservation—are
reflected in the decision to not fully air-condition the atrium.
This provides a balance between the fully air-conditioned lab areas
and the outside environment while reducing the operating costs of
the building.
By its very nature, a plant science research facility uses much
more energy than a typical office building. The heating, ventilation,
and air-conditioning (HVAC) system, for example, uses 100 percent
outside air—the typical office building uses 20 to 30 percent fresh
air, says Ray Myers, project director for the construction manager
McCarthy Building Companies—so it doesn’t contaminate experiments
in one lab with airborne particles from another lab. That forces
the HVAC equipment to use more energy to heat building air in the
winter and cool it in the summer than it would for an office building.
This facility, however, also has a heat recovery system, says Michael
Bieg, president of Icon Mechanical, one of the mechanical contractors
during construction of the facility. That system captures thermal
energy from exhaust air and uses it to help heat, or cool, as necessary,
outside air before sending it through the building.
Guarding against the cross contamination of experiments also means
HVAC equipment has to be bigger than in most buildings. “The [HVAC]
design is based on 16 air changes in occupied space every hour...where
the typical building has only five-to-six changes,” Myers says.
The Danforth Center HVAC system uses three chillers, two 750-ton
units for the main 150,000-square-foot building, and a 200-ton unit
for the growth chambers and greenhouse complex, all linked together
in a loop to provide redundancy if one unit should fail or is shutdown
for maintenance.
Above:
Zhihong Zhang, a scientist in the laboratory of Danforth Center.
In terms of the electrical service, Gordon Kummer, assistant vice
president of Sachs Electric, says the building takes five megawatts
to power, about twice what is required for a similarly-sized Highway
40 office building. To insure against power outages, the electrical
system includes a backup diesel generator with a 5,000 gallon fuel
tank that can be refueled while it is running to provide a continuous
source of power.
One of the signature features of the building is the huge sunshade
with motorized louvers on the south facade or Olive Street side
of the building. The design calls for eventually enclosing that
space to form a three-story high rise soleil with motorized louvers
on the bottom matching those on the roof. The louvers, powered by
photovoltaic cells, will open to allow hot air to rise out of the
top while drawing cooler air in through the bottom, turning the
space into a solar chimney that helps cool the building.
Another of the building’s innovative features serves several functions.
The terra cotta and aluminum exterior is really a rain-screen curtain
wall with integral sunshading louvers. It tempers the effects of
weather on the building envelope, while also, in Myers’ words, giving
the building “more of a European flavor.” Terra cotta, he says,
though rarely used in the U.S., is used widely in Europe. It is
also, according to the architect, an “expressive cladding system
that demonstrates the meeting of technology and nature, which is
the essence of the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center.”
“We have a global perspective and we wanted to reflect that in the
design and function of the building,” says Sam Fiorello, senior
vice president, administration and finance, for the Danforth Center.
“Plant science is important to feed the world’s growing population
in a sustainable way, without polluting the water and sacrificing
topsoil,” explains William Danforth. “The benefits will be better
diet, better health, protection of the environment, social stability,
and a strengthening of the science base and economy of the region.”
This building, says Roger Beachy, president of the Danforth Center,
“will help make the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center a go-to
site for research about food, health and nutrition.”
Above:
Danforth Center researchers (left to right:) Nicole Kokora, Chellapan
Padmanabhan, Jitender Yadav and Ben Fofana discussing their work.
The Center’s greenhouse complex is in the background.
Peter Downs is a free-lance writer and editor of Construction
News & Review.
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