Overbudget: What to Do When Your Lab Design is Too Expensive

By: Benjamin Plackett

Soon to break ground, the Birmingham Energy Institute will house research and teaching facilities. 

Image credit: The University of Birmingham

The year 2024 is going to be big for Martin Freer. He’s a nuclear physicist at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom. The construction of a new building for the Birmingham Energy Institute, of which he is also the director, is due to break ground this year. It will house teaching facilities alongside research laboratories where scientists will investigate a range of topics including hydrogen fuels, energy storage, novel materials, and future vehicle technologies. In all, the university has invested £50 million ($64 million USD) into the ambitious project. 

Anyone who has watched an episode of the British television series Grand Designs knows just how easy it is for construction projects to go spectacularly over budget—and that’s just building a house. Projects like Freer’s are a different and altogether more vexing task. Lab design should also consider health and safety, environmental impact, chemical storage, and the need to facilitate complex and energy-intensive machinery. Keeping to a budget, even a large one, is no small feat.

On top of these issues, the construction industry is particularly sensitive to the volatility of the global economy. Supply chain issues, following the COVID-19 pandemic, haven’t yet fully rectified themselves, and rising prices for labor and materials are a concern. 

“If you go through a year with very high inflation, it eats into your margins,” laments Freer. “We’ve set a large contingency fund, recognizing that inflation is going to be an issue. That’s built into the budget plans.”

Even with meticulous planning, however, “the budgets are never big enough. People's imaginations are always bigger than the budget,” says Freer. 

Such expectations can give rise to disagreements between project managers, researchers, engineers, and architects. Feelings of resentment, however, aren’t inevitable. If communication is effective and people feel appropriately involved in decision-making, a renovation or construction project is more likely to be a successful and rewarding experience. Freer has previously been involved in similar construction projects and he says that how you start a project is especially important because it sets the tone of what is to come.

Managing expectations

Part of Freer’s job is to manage the expectations of his fellow researchers who are eager to move into the new building. Engaging end users of the lab with architects and administrators before any construction takes place is key to making sure that none of them end up disappointed, he says. 

“Cost is always a constraint and so there’s this kind of cycle that you need to go through,” says Freer. “You will design something notionally and then somebody goes away and does a proper design and then it goes to costing. Then you come back and realize you can’t afford it. Then there is a process of optimization and rationalization that needs to happen.” 

Freer is currently working to involve the numerous stakeholders in this “feedback loop process” in a bid to help smooth the way for a successful project. “The end user needs to be there at the beginning so they can see why you had to make certain compromises,” he says. “For us, it was six to nine months of going around in that loop to get the design right.”

That approach is wise, says Rick Sharp, an associate director of the Fairhursts Design Group, an architecture and design company in Manchester, UK, with expertise in building laboratories and research spaces. 

“Everyone asks for more than they really need because they want to be sure they actually get what they need to their job,” he says. “That’s why we meet with the scientists, show them some visuals, and run through the whole design with them. It’s really important for architects to engage with them.”

In other words, it’s about stopping disputes before they even arise. 

Long-term thinking

Looking for efficiencies is a crucial way to minimize the tension between what a researcher wants in their new lab and the reality of available funds. One of the most effective ways to get bang for your buck, Freer says, is to think about the space in the long run.

“When you design a lab, the last thing that you want is that somebody comes in, uses the space, and then ceases doing what they're doing in terms of a research project or set of experiments, and then the lab doesn't have functionality for things in the future,” he says. “To be sustainable and to be resilient, you need to create a space which has flexibility.”

Framing your design process in this way—again, from the very beginning—helps to focus the mind on what is most important, which is helpful when budgets inevitably get tighter as design projects progress. It means that when difficult decisions need to be made later on, you already have a sense of what to prioritize. 

“We did quite a lot of workshopping where we had the lab users in a room and we went through different design options and their costs, getting them to collectively prioritize what goes into the original design,” says Freer. This should help to keep conflicts between architects and laboratory users to a minimum.

Part of this process involves getting scientists and researchers to think about how their fields will evolve in the coming decades, and therefore how their experiments might change. This can mean embracing modular design to create laboratory spaces that are relatively easy to reconfigure and repurpose without significant reconstruction. Adjustable shelving, machinery that can occupy different places in a lab, and an overabundance of power sockets can all help to ensure that a lab can adapt to different needs in the future. 

“The design opportunity is not necessarily what a researcher is doing now,” explains Freer. “Instead, it’s what they could be doing in the future with a state-of-the-art facility. I think sometimes academics find that bit a lot harder to think about.” 

In the end, though, if a researcher thinks strategically about the trajectory of their career and their wider field of interest, it ends up benefiting their science as well as the laboratory design.

As part of this “future gazing” exercise, researchers can also consider how their labs might benefit colleagues in other fields of expertise. If spaces can be deemed to be of interdisciplinary use, it can help to make a compelling argument for return of investment—it can also help to resolve financial constraints by bringing in budgetary contributions from different departments. 

This same approach works well for maintaining labs and refurbishing them as well as constructing new ones, says Katharina Richter, a biomedical researcher at the University of Adelaide in Australia. 

“We urgently needed a new -80C freezer to store bacterial strains and cell culture and tissue samples,” she says. “I buddied up with other research groups in my institute and wrote the grant application in collaboration with them and made the case that every group will get an allocated space in the new freezer. Everyone gets a piece of the cake, hence it’s great value for money.”

Ring-fence your priorities—be strict

Once you’ve decided what you most want to achieve with the new lab, it can be helpful to specifically allocate a chunk of the budget to it. 

“We will ring-fence parts of the budget,” says Freer. “We’re saying at the beginning of the process that these pots of funding are dedicated to certain things, and you can’t take from one to fund the other.”

To help make sure this plan stays on track, the details of the contracts you sign with builders and construction companies really matters, says Freer. Global supply chain issues can mean that materials as crucial as cement and steel are difficult to source and time is money when it comes to construction. 

“It depends how you agree your contracts with a constructor and who owns the risk,” explains Freer. “If you’re careful, you load the delay risks on the contractor, so you aren’t responsible for them yourself.”

An open mind and a willingness to be nimble are perhaps the most fundamental assets in designing a laboratory. Budgets are fixed, so you simply can’t afford to be rigid in your thinking. Work out what can be added in after construction is completed and be prepared to temporarily jettison that part of the design. By comparison, prioritize what can’t easily be retrofitted. And finally, keep an open dialogue between architects and researchers. “It’s crucial if you want people not to be too grumpy at the end of the process,” Freer says.

Benjamin Plackett is a freelance science journalist based in London. He can be reached at www.benjaminplackett.co.uk.