A look at the complex role of the vivarium as both research and training facility and some guidelines for designing best-fit vivaria for higher education.

The vivarium plays a complex and essential role in higher education. Changes in research methodologies and culture as well as advances in our understanding of how people learn are necessarily changing best practices in science education. This transformation is especially visible on the undergraduate level, where the shift to discovery-based pedagogies requires colleges and universities to invest in flexible facilities that support hands-on, collaborative research opportunities across traditional disciplinary lines. The vivarium is a critical component of such a learning environment, but one whose design presents particular challenges for institution and architect.

Research Environment
Vivaria are central to research in the life sciences. Even in this age of cell and tissue culturing, biochemical tests, and computer simulations, nothing explains the complex processes that occur in living creatures better than animal research subjects. Laboratory research animals have been the vital biological models behind medical advances ranging from insulin, antibiotics, and the Salk vaccine to medical technologies, including CAT scans and medicated stents, to surgical techniques for heart bypass and organ transplant surgery. As nanotechnology enables researchers to work on the cellular level, the vivarium remains essential to the research landscape— and increasingly, to the teaching environment.

Learning Environment
Fiscal and space constraints mean that college and university vivaria are considerably smaller in scale than their research and industry counterparts, yet they are subject to the same rigorous oversight and accreditation requirements. Why? College vivaria are working facilities that support science faculty research; they are a recruitment tool as well as a means of professional advancement for academic scientists. College vivaria also function as learning environments.

Today’s students learn about science by doing science. Working in a fully operational vivarium teaches students about the life sciences, introduces a range of career opportunities in science research, and instills the discipline of research and safety protocols as well as ethical awareness of the use of animals as research subjects. While campus vivaria advance any number of scientific inquiries and investigations, these specialized laboratories are also cultivating the next generation of researchers.

Global Competition in the Sciences
Globalization is increasing the speed at which science advances and the ways in which researchers collaborate. At the same time, intellectual and financial competition, especially related to medical applications and devices, is on the rise.With our students ranking poorly in math and sciences among first-world nations, the United States now faces additional competition from third-world countries that embrace science as an economic engine and clear path to a global presence. Nanobiotechnology, regenerative medicine, personalized medicine—these evolving fields are triggering a boom in the business of the life sciences and medical applications.

Our success as a nation depends in large part on our ability to engage the next generation with science. Science literacy is no longer enough. Our students must develop the ability to think broadly, adaptively, and quickly across the blurring boundaries of traditional disciplines. In addition to enabling them to participate in research and publication opportunities, getting a taste of possible career options, original research projects provide students with ample opportunities to develop skills in intellectual improvisation that will serve them well in every field.

New Pedagogies
Project Kaleidoscope (PKAL) is an informal alliance in the United States that advocates building and sustaining effective undergraduate programs in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Designing learning environments that support hands-on, collaborative pedagogies is critical to attracting undergraduates to the increasingly important STEM fields and to fast-tracking their readiness for careers in research and industry. From freshman coursework to their senior projects, today’s college students are exposed to real science and related protocols in research laboratories governed by the same rigorous controls as those in the for-profit sector. Hands-on science engages the brain on more than one level, bringing the same lesson home through different senses and pathways. This integrated approach develops pro-activity and critical big-picture thinking skills that enable the effective intellectual improvisations of inquiry, experimentation, and discovery.

The Right Way to do Science
As a working science environment, the campus vivarium supports faculty research and provides opportunities for students to engage in research with their mentors. Young scientists learn by doing and by observing the right way to conduct research, up close and in real time. In a working vivarium, this translates into effective, continuous lessons in the biosecurity, biosafety, security, and ethics protocols without which accredited animal research laboratories cannot function.

In addition to learning how to safeguard experiments, animals, and themselves, students working in vivaria gain knowledge of the standards for the ethical treatment of animal research subjects. All teaching and research involving animals is predicated on the humane and ethical treatment of the animal research subjects entrusted to the vivaria. The ethical stewardship of animal subjects is the responsibility of everyone in the vivarium. Through participation as well as observation, students learn the right way to handle the animals on whom scientific and medical research depends.

Institutional Objectives for Campus Vivaria
As central as vivaria are to student and faculty research in the biological sciences, these facilities account for an average of only ten percent of first [construction] costs for higher education science facilities. Vivaria likewise occupy a relatively small footprint in college and university science facilities, even though they must serve an increasing percentage of science students. Although small in scale, campus vivaria must nevertheless serve multiple functions and meet the same rigorous accreditation criteria as research facilities in university and industry settings.

Securing accreditation helps undergraduate institutions maximize their investment in support of a range of strategic recruitment and retention goals. Long a staple in attracting the best faculty members, laboratories are increasingly valued as strong selling points by prospective students and their parents. And as the nature of undergraduate science education has changed, so have students’ expectations for the range of opportunities that will be available to them and the quality of the facilities in which they will work. Accredited BSL-2 vivaria have the versatility to support research (and therefore instruction) in infectious disease development and transmission as well as in animal breeding and behavior. In a state-of the- art unified science complex, a vivarium is a research necessity and a contributing factor to institutional brand differentiation.

Given the twin constraints of funding and footprint, higher education vivaria must be highly flexible, convertible, and usable. Their maintenance and upkeep must be simple and not add an undue burden to the campus facilities budget. And in an era when sustainability is a significant strategic commitment, vivaria must also be as energy efficient as possible. Aligning these many requirements requires a thoughtful planning process that accommodates the overarching issues of accreditation, programming, and pedagogy.

Flexibility
Leveraging small budgets to achieve lofty pedagogical aspirations begins with establishing a working partnership among owners, users, and the design team. An inclusive process in which programmatic challenges are thoroughly mapped out helps establish needs versus wants; substantiates a range of options; explores creative solutions; and ultimately results in a strategic and effective design. Programs for higher education’s smaller-scale vivaria pose four major design challenges:

1. Multiple researchers (faculty and students)
2. Complex utilization (projects/ semester)
3. Multiple species (sometimes in the same room)
4. Multipurpose (research and instruction)

Planning for flexibility is key to campus vivarium design, but successful designs go beyond flexibility to ensure adaptability (convertibility) and diversity of use—for today’s needs as well as tomorrow’s. The campus vivarium must accommodate a range of different research projects (e.g., genetics vs. behavioral science), different species (e.g., mice vs. frogs), and different functions (research vs. instruction). The smaller the vivarium, the more critical it is to right-size its design. This process drills down from room measurements and larger equipment like benching and racks to consider details such as fittings, utility hookups, adjacencies, door placements, and individual cage or pen types. Fit-out considerations such as elevator door heights, net door clearances, corridor widths, and turning radiuses at corners ensure practical access to and within the facility.

Generically sized rooms that accommodate different combinations of movable racks, fume hoods, benching, C-frames, and storage enable spaces to function as either holding or procedure rooms. Flexibility for handling different species is achieved by including HVAC exhaust drops for ventilated cage racks, mobile sinks and casework, and trench floor drains. Vivaria housing larger species require additional necropsy and examination equipment as well as further procedural space. Finally, the vivarium infrastructure must have the capacity to accommodate planned additions as well as programmatic growth and evolving technologies. Designing the HVAC system for maximum load requires analysis of operational diversity as well as the up-front choice of rack housing systems.

Convertibility
Adaptability is another critical design attribute that builds on flexibility by ensuring variable control of environmental criteria. Temperature and humidity, lighting, noise and vibrations, and airflow—these elements, which support biosafety, biosecurity, and the reliability of data, need to be adjusted to meet the needs of diverse experiments. Adaptable designs include monitoring and controls for air quantity and pressurization; temperature and humidity; light cycles; and room access.

Biosecurity
Contamination of research subjects, either human-to-animal or animal-to animal, poses a major threat to laboratory experiment results in undergraduate as well as research and industry labs. Contamination by handlers, cross-contamination among the subjects of various research projects, and fight-or-flight stress responses among species contribute to misleading and unusable results. To ensure that research subjects are healthy and not suffering undue stress, all vivaria researchers employ biosecurity measures—air locks, animal handling and cage cleaning protocols, micro-barrier systems, and dedicated HVAC systems—to protect the health and well-being of animal research subjects. Biosafety measures build on the above through the use of masks, gloves, and other protective clothing to protect the health and well-being of researchers as they handle test subjects and samples. Security of the vivarium overall supports both biosecurity and biosafety and protects the validity of experiments by preventing inadvertent or malicious tampering.

Conclusion
The speed of innovation in today’s world, driven by rapidly emerging intersections in science and technology, requires correspondingly efficient and effective knowledge transfer. Colleges and universities are advancing new ways of preparing the next generation for a technologically complex and competitive global workplace. The transformation of undergraduate science education from a lecture- to discovery-based learning model requires laboratory facilities that support collaborative, hands-on research within tightly constrained spaces. Rather than being straightforward “scale models” of real-world research environments, however, fully functional and code-compliant campus vivaria are also more flexible, convertible, and easy to maintain than their industry counterparts. These innovatively designed vivaria transcend and transform the requirements for animal research. They are unique laboratories for cultivating the next generation of scientific minds.

Robert DeGenova AIA, NCARB is a Sr. Laboratory Design Expert, Senior Associate for EYP Architecture & Engineering. Bob has more than 25 years of experience in architectural design, specializing in research environment. He has programmed and planned more than 2 million square feet of science and technology facilities throughout North America, Europe, and Asia. Bob’s considerable expertise in the design of laboratories extends to research and development; vivaria for large and small animals; biomedical and translational research; biocontainment; pharmaceutical manufacturing; academic science facilities; and the development of master plans. EYP Architecture & Engineering P.C., 225 Varick Street, 2nd Floor, New York, NY 10014; 917-981-6028; eypae.com.