Tour of the Bio Science Building

      In mid-March,  I went to visit the biological building with my teacher and classmates. Julie and her colleague received us warmly and answered our questions.

      The building has five floors and is divided into two parts. The old building is a standard enclosed multi-storey teaching building with a 12m column span. The main space has no inner columns. The rooms are on both sides of and the walkway is in middle. This is a very common old-style layout design, which balances the cost and function. The central courtyard also brings more natural lighting. Most functional spaces are not deeper than 9 m. The new building is an extension to the old part. The main spaces inside it are large laboratories and computer rooms. It is conceivable that these functional spaces need to be further expanded. The structure should be steel.

       According to rough statistics, there are 16,000 square meters, 10,000 old and 6000 new. The height of the storey should be 4.5 meters on the first floor and 3.5 meters on the upper floor. The specific statistics of each functional area and analysis of its characteristics will be written in another article.

Features:

1. Teaching laboratory, which has 60 seats and 2 people share one screen

2. Research laboratories are fully equipped which have two specifications

3. The preparation area of ​​the laboratory is larger than I thought, and the temperature of various cold storage spaces is not the same. There is also a dark room

4. 5 stairs, 2 elevators, but not enough

5. Every laboratory is equipped with an emergency shower, it seems that doing experiments is really dangerous

6. Large rest space, equipped with simple heating and refrigerator. Maybe some necessary socializing is really helpful for these people who are stuck in their lab

7. Single offices for teachers and doctors, which are arranged in large rows. Each of them is not too large

8. There are only a few small meeting rooms and there may be no need of a big one

9. There are greenhouses on the roof to cultivate plants and small insects. It is sait that there are animals center in other buildings.

10. There is no dedicated classroom and no large speech space but many computer space

11. A large garden in the middle , full of plants and a nice pool

Needs:

1. More elevators and walkways to facilitate the transportation of goods

2. More storage space, it seems that they have filled up the existing space

3. The special unloading site should have requirements on the size

4. The exhibition space for displaying research results.

Deficiencies:

1. Insufficient communication, only the space and no related activities, except for some specific parties. Different groups of people do not have enough reasons to interact

2. The streamline is too long and the guidance is so poor. This is a common problem of this kind of layout.

Sum up:

        The plan is merging the 6 biological buildings on the campus into one, which is the current design. I suspect that the other 5 buildings should not be too large, otherwise it will not fit into the new building of 30,000 square meters. Under the current virtual premise, kindergartens and safety buildings are not occupied. Then the allocation of area is very important. I am currently considering equal proportion reduction, which means keeping the proportion unchanged.

        I plan to refer to the area allocation of the existing Thomas building, combined with more digital teaching concepts in the future, which leads to more computer space. And I should actively encourage the interaction of different groups of people, create activities to guide the use of space.