Little (big) things that matter

Every day we go about our lives without a great deal of thought of the far reaching impact of the work with which we engage. We take our kids to school, work late hours in order to meet a deadline and in the world of the architect, we worry about the how to improve our designs to better meet the programmatic need of the end-users or use a clever material to enhance the quality of the environment.

However, the design work that we do to support Science has far reaching impact far beyond that of the environment we’ve created. Some of my architecture school colleagues, who work at “high-design” firms, ask (with a hint of distain) why I’ve spent a large part of my career designing biocontainment laboratories that most people will never see. Recently, my flippant answer has been, “turn on the news.” Typically this results in a puzzled look or shrug of the shoulders. The explanation, in reality, is actually quite simple … because it matters.

There hasn’t been a single day in the past nine months where the news outlets haven’t focused on the Ebola crisis. The disease is spreading across Western Africa and is then transported to many parts of the world via our robust global transportation network. There is global anxiety about the virus darkening our doors. People are worried about the potential impact on themselves, their families and friends; and to a degree they should be. While the threat of pandemic outbreak of Ebola in the United States is improbable, that doesn’t negate the need for our research community to lead the effort for a vaccine and advanced treatment methodologies.

A year after the physical completion of the laboratory facility, the Centers for Disease Control granted the Pell Lab for Advanced Biological Research (Penn State University) the license to work with Select Agents. These are pathogens and diseases that threaten our global society, either by pandemic outbreak or more insidiously, through weaponization by those who wish to destabilize the civilized world. The real achievement of this space has yet to be realized. It wasn’t the completion of the building. It was neither the Lab of the Year Award nor the other accolades the building received. The completion of the Pell Lab is merely a tool. A tool that brilliant researchers require to work with highly-pathogenic infectious disease agents safely, securely and in a laboratory environment as comfortable as one can be when dealing with this line of work.

Unfortunately, we live in a time when infectious disease will increasingly dominate the world dialog. Fortunately, we have research teams that are dedicating their lives to creating vaccines, diagnostics and treatments for pathogens such as Tularemia, Tuberculosis and Dengue Fever.

So, while much of the biocontainment work that we do hasn’t graced the cover of architectural publications … it matters.