You could assume that a new laboratory building for an Ivy League institution would be state-of-the-art. So it is not surprising that Brown University’s recently completed $88 million Engineering Research Center (ERC) provides top-notch facilities. The three-story, 81,000-square-foot building, designed by the Philadelphia firm KieranTimberlake, sits near the eastern edge of the Providence, Rhode Island, campus and contains 22 highly flexible laboratories, a set of clean rooms for the study of nanoscale materials, microelectronics, and photonics, and a high-performance imaging suite.

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Yet what makes the ERC stand out is not its inventory of sophisticated equipment but the project’s lofty goal to contribute to the larger campus environment. The ambition, says Larry Larson, the engineering school’s dean, “was to enhance community and enhance research.”

For the architects, this meant making the most of the ERC’s location at the terminus of a series of contiguous quadrangles leading from Brown’s main green, where the 250-year-old university’s most historic buildings are clustered. “A site at the end of this axis seemed like a real obligation,” says Stephen Kieran, KieranTimberlake partner. Taking this responsibility seriously, Kieran and his team opted to extend the succession of green spaces. Together with the low-slung 1960s Prince Engineering Lab (one of three existing structures to which the new building is attached), the L-shaped ERC frames a grassy, gentle slope.

The new research facility and its outdoor public space replace four late 19th- and early 20th-century single-family dwellings that had housed various academic departments. But what dominated the site before construction of the ERC was the seven-story windowless brick end elevation of Barus and Holley, a lab and faculty office building from the same era as Prince. Now, however, instead of a looming, blank masonry wall, anyone approaching from the older campus on a mild day encounters students lounging on the lush lawn and an inviting transparency: the ERC almost completely obscures the much taller older building with a lively facade that includes vertical glass fiber reinforced concrete (GFRC) shading fins, expanded metal mesh scrims, aluminum composite panels, and insulated spandrel glass, along with clear glazing. And as people get closer, elements like a window into a ground-floor clean room—with its glowing, UV-filtering amber glass—provide clues about what kind of work goes on inside. “So many science buildings are mute,” says Kieran, “and they don’t need to be.”

Just beyond an arcade of granite-clad columns, the social space continues inside the building with a generous commons and café that occupy most of the ground floor. Here the exposed steel structure and 15-foot-tall ceilings create a loft-like feel, while tables and chairs and cushioned seating provide areas for studying or taking a break overlooking the new quad. According to Larson, the spot—named for engineering professor emeritus Barrett Hazeltine, whose course on entrepreneurship was hugely popular with liberal arts students for decades—attracts graduate and undergraduate students from all over campus, not just engineers.

Upstairs are most of the real workhorse spaces, including easily reconfigurable labs flanked by “collab” open-office research areas. Here, polished concrete floors highlight circulation, while HVAC systems and the copious utilities for the laboratories are neatly organized and visible overhead. But Kieran says he would not have had the confidence to leave these elements exposed had it not been for the integrated project delivery agreement among client, firm, and contractor, which allowed closer collaboration with trade partners and enabled successful meshing of design intent and constructability.

The architects clearly made sure the less than sexy aspects of the building were right, but not at the expense of the architectural details, such as an open stair that connects all levels. It skillfully combines balustrades of glass or folded steel plate with wooden handrails and open-riser terrazzo treads.

The intense study that went into the building envelope is also obvious. The depth of its GFRC fins, which help control heat gain and glare, have been tuned through solar analyses to each facade’s orientation. KieranTimberlake built the first of many visual and performance mockups in the firm’s own fabrication shop in its large Philadelphia office (in a former beer-bottling plant). Although the assembly appears to be primarily glass, it is in fact an unusual hybrid of a unitized curtain wall and a rainscreen system, thus improving its thermal properties. The skin is one of several features that have put the ERC on track to earn LEED Gold, including active chilled beams, outdoor air heat recovery, and an all-LED lighting system controlled by occupancy and daylight sensors.

This focus on energy savings is just one more facet of the smartly designed and expertly realized ERC. It is another way the building goes beyond promoting the most advanced engineering to create an amenity for the entire university community and to enhance—with contemporary architecture—an historic New England campus.