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This is What a $225 Million Physics Laboratory Looks Like

By Sam Cholke | November 10, 2015 6:48am


The lights are all orange in some of the labs working on molecular-level etchings for microchips and other projects. [DNAinfo/Sam Cholke]

HYDE PARK — Two stories below the street, orange lights brighten the $225 million new research laboratory on the University of Chicago campus.

On a tour of the newly opened Eckhardt Research Center, 5640 S. Ellis Ave., it’s not immediately obvious among the researchers in clean white jumpsuits that the walls extend well beyond where the structure stops above ground.

“The labs extend under the quad,” said Mary Collins of HOK, the architecture firm that built the lab.

Physicists, chemists and molecular engineers have some very exacting standards that probably sound strange to anyone outside the field, and to meet those standards they’re not shy about tearing up the new research lab.

In the basement labs, many of the lights were orange and windows coated with an orange film to prevent stray ultra-violet light from disrupting a microchip being created at a microscopic level.

On Monday, a group working on the university’s telescope at the South Pole had just laid claim to a lab with a crane that could lift four tons 25 feet in the air. Another brand new lab was already shut down and the workbenches covered in tarps.

“It was a beautiful lab and then they tore it apart,” Collins said.

The professor who was to use it wanted more exhaust hoods installed to vent out chemical fumes and the work was being redone to his standards.

“Flexibility is the name of the game in lab design,” Collins said. “They could take out the chemistry labs and convert it back into physics labs.”

If that sounds like an easy remodel, it’s not because of the precision required in a top academic research lab. Some rooms have to be maintained at a higher pressure from the outside hallways to prevent dust from coming in. Temperatures need to often be regulated to within a half-a-degree. It’s exacting stuff.

HOK found several big innovations for the lab — and a couple of small tweaks.

Collins said all pipes, vents, electrical boxes and nearly anything else that could mess with an experiment was now in the hallways and wouldn't ever be repaired inside a lab and interrupt an experiment. She said the building also includes a freight elevator that can lift 22,000 pounds, making it a lot easier to move equipment around.

Some standards had to be totally made up where there just weren’t city codes to regulate what to do with the volatile waste that some experiments produce.

Collins said the Chicago Fire Department asked the university to install blowout panels in the a storage room for researchers who were often working with explosive chemicals. If something were to go wrong with the many backups and failsafes, two 10-feet steel doors would blast open, releasing the pressure out of the building so it didn’t tear into the labs.

Collins said next time HOK would try something different when it came to meeting some of the physicists’ demands that there be nearly zero vibrations in the building from the buses and cars passing by outside.

To solve this problem at the Eckhardt Lab, the floors between the labs look like a giant concrete waffle.

“It’s very stiff and very heavy, so it’s good for vibrations,” Collins said. “But it was a headache to work with.”

She said a super thick concrete slab would probably have been just as effective. In fact, there’s 36 inches of concrete below the second basement, nearly three stories underground, that’s easily 30 inches thicker than most comparable buildings.

At a cost of $225 million, it’s not surprising the 265,000-square-foot laboratory complex has some features above and beyond the average workspace.

And the university said it’s in high demand.

Steve Koppes, a spokesman for the university, said all labs were already occupied or have a faculty member planning to move in.

He said every lab would be running 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, with every spare moment rented out to outside researchers or private industry.


Some of the underground labs extend well beyond the walls of the building at street level.


The group in charge of the university's South Pole telescope has claimed a lab with a crane that can lift four tons.


Architects said they were surprised how quickly researchers adapted the labs to suit their needs.


A Justus Roe mural dominates the entryway to the Eckhardt Research Center.

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