Madison, Wisc.-based Flad Architects will design two new additions for Northwestern University's Technological Institute: a five-story addition to house engineering life sciences programs, and a three-story addition that includes a new, larger cleanroom, flexible laboratories, and office space. These new facilities will support multidisciplinary research.

"During the last decade, at (Northwestern) and across the country, biology has joined physics, mathematics and chemistry as an integral part of engineering," said Julio M. Ottino, dean of the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science. "As disciplinary boundaries fall, traditional engineering departments have expanded into biological sciences."

Northwestern's Technological Institute is already one of the largest academic buildings in the world, with more than 750,000 sq. ft. of classrooms, offices, laboratories, and research facilities. It houses the school of engineering as well as the departments of chemistry and earth and planetary sciences. Over the last 65 years, the building has undergone multiple renovations and additions to accommodate the ever evolving scientific community at Northwestern University.

In this latest expansion, the engineering life sciences addition will house the Integrated Molecular Structure Education and Research Center, which provides essential shared instrumentation for the analysis of molecules and materials. Totaling 54,000 gross square feet, the building will also accommodate electrical engineering teaching labs, and core laboratory and office space for McCormick researchers whose work emphasizes the life sciences and their relation to engineering.

The cleanroom portion of the project will support new equipment specifically designed for undertaking interdisciplinary research. The balance of the building will be allocated to offices, dry lab spaces, and much needed flexible laboratory space. A new atrium will provide natural light to areas in the existing building and the new 20,000-gross-sq.-ft. addition.

Specific areas of study facilitated by the new additions include biologically-inspired devices, computational biology, bioinformatics, neural engineering, patient safety, rehabilitation engineering, tissue engineering, biologically based materials, biomimetics, and sustainability.