Robert H. Lurie Medical Research Center
Cost: $165 million

The Robert H. Lurie Medical Research Center in Chicago is being built in part to elevate the stature of Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine.

The 12-story facility will house nine levels of laboratories, and each level will have 12 laboratories. About 700 researchers, postdoctoral students and technicians will be housed in the facility.

Research in many advanced areas - cancer, genetics, neurology, infectious diseases, and nanotechnology - will be housed in the building.

The remainder of the facility will include lecture halls, auditoriums and dining on the first floor and mechanical equipment in the basement, second and top levels.

Sensitivity to the surrounding campus buildings, many featuring Gothic design elements, was important. Steel columns will be exposed, and the steel crossing the building top will call to mind flying buttresses. Architectural precast dresses the building.

The facility is named after the late real estate developer whose wife, Ann, a Northwestern University trustee and principal of Lurie Investments Inc. in Chicago, make a $40 million gift for the project.

Earth Retention Needed

The facility in NU's downtown Chicago campus required a 40-ft.-deep space below grade in part to hold animals used in medical research.

Because of regulatory requirements, a large number of mechanical lines will feed the space, and redundant services protect against loss in case a system goes down. If anything happened to the animals, it could be a catastrophic loss to the researchers.

The structure's location in the building-dense Streeterville area was a cause for concern. Pressure from adjacent structures on the excavation walls could cause them to move and other unintended outcomes, like settlement of adjacent streets and-or buildings.

An earth-retention system that employed grouted steel tiebacks was used to make the building's foundation rigid.

The replacement or modification of utility lines around the site was done as a precaution to ensure they would not fail in case settling did occur.

Inside, planning was done to accommodate the large number of mechanical, electrical and plumbing systems.

Two meetings were held every week for nine months to coordinate the project. For the building's lower levels, the most complicated interstitial spaces were replicated to ensure they were accessible after completion of the building and could be maintained.

Mock-ups were fabricated for the laboratory casework to ensure the correct placement of plumbing, conduit and drawers. Sixty-four fume hoods will provide independent exhaust to the laboratory spaces.

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