Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory outside of Batavia, Ill., is a Dept. of Energy national lab specializing in high-energy particle physics. Before the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland, was completed in 2008, Fermilab had the world’s most powerful particle accelerator.

Fermilab’s brutalist Wilson Hall was completed in 1971. While it is still an entirely functional engineering and laboratory building, the kind of collaboration that both Fermilab and DoE want for the next 50 years required adding a new building with a collaborative design approach. By 2017, Fermilab’s 1,750 scientists, engineers and other employees needed something new.

“Wilson Hall is the main 16-story office tower that’s the workhorse for collaboration, for meetings, for getting people together and working on projects,” says Brian Rubik, Fermilab’s project manager and in-house structural engineer. “That was completed in the early seventies. There’s been a lot of development and newer workplace practices to create effective collaboration and things of that nature in the ensuing decades. So, to have the laboratory go this long without really an update for people’s workspaces and collaboration, it’s certainly needed.”

新的合作

In 2017, Perkins and Will and Arup won a DoE design competition for an $56-million new building called the Integrated Engineering Research Center. The two-story building is connected to Wilson Hall at the ground floor and will deliver 80,000 sq ft of offices, workspaces and testing labs. Three east-west corridors are used as a device to create distinct workspace neighborhoods. To support each lab, an equipment chase sits next to it, allowing noisy, heat-producing equipment to be near, but also outside of the lab itself.

珀金斯副校长，威尔的科学技术实践的副校长阿达娜·约翰（Adana Johns）说：“ [Fermilab科学家]正在……努力进行他们如何进行实验，我们必须收集这些信息。”“这变得非常投机。‘你现在如何工作？您将如何通过此实验来解决这个问题？那空间需要什么？’当您查看平面图时，确实表明这是一个高度模块化，灵活的工作环境。”

Perkins + Will团队的计划试图最大程度地提高科学在未来50年内属于粒子物理的灵活性。

“They needed this incredible adaptable, flexible framework to give them all these opportunities,” says Tom Mozina, design principal at Perkins and Will’s Chicago office. “The ground level project labs have all been designed as high-bay spaces and outfitted with overhead cranes to assist in moving heavy equipment in support of their research. This strategy of openness and flexibility was a means of trying to future-proof the labs because it is hard to anticipate where the science is going to take them.”

Ground was broken last summer, and contractor Mortenson first had to remove and reorganize existing underground infrastructure. A horseshoe-shaped entry drive and an 5-ft-tall raised berm that is a radiation shield for Fermilab’s 1.25-mile-dia Tevatron beam line for the underground particle accelerator both had to be reconfigured.

莫滕森项目主管卡尔·克雷特（Carl Kreiter）说：“实际上，我们不得不从光束线上覆盖。”“这样做的是，Fermilab的辐射小组特别需要并设计了屏蔽。因此，我们不得不放入新的屏蔽层，这确实是几英寸厚的钢板。这样，我们可以安全地消除覆盖层，然后在活动梁线上创建新的车道。然后在护堤上创建该驱动器。”

Industrial chilled water, electrical and communication infrastructure and stormwater tunnels had to be reconfigured. Fermilab’s engineers gave Mortenson drawings to show how to stagger the joints in the steel shielding plates to create layers that made their installation akin to putting puzzle pieces together. Foundation and steel erection work began in winter 2020.

“我们被西方威尔逊大厅和一个有界active particle accelerator beam line that runs adjacent to our site along the eastern bound,” says Aaron Tabares, electrical engineer in Arup’s Chicago office. “The form of the building is rather narrow and long [420 ft long by 113 ft wide], which is a direct result of the impact of these existing facilities.”

Flexible Infrastructure

Tabares says that one of the distribution features of the building is that it has a spine of utilities that run between all of the project labs on the ground floor.

“That’s basically the [electrical, piping and mechanical] highway,” he said. “If Fermilab needs to modify the spaces in the future, they have a main artery running through the center of building to leverage.”

Interior spans were planned so that large lab spaces could be column free. The building’s narrowness allowed a whole building daylighting strategy. Arup ran several iterations of energy models with Perkins and Will to determine the most efficient envelope possible. Shading structures and exterior facade components were designed by Perkins and Will based off the impacts of those features in the energy model. Flexibility for the future was extended to the building’s systems.

“It’s a matter of taking standards and codes, considering them and applying them where they’re appropriate, but also using engineering judgment coupled with performance-based design to say ‘the owner has defined actual function, so we should design based on their real usage,’” Tabares said.

他说：“许多[机械策略]都是基于控制的。”“设备的尺寸是针对最坏的情况，但是控制方案创造了运营建筑智能，该智能可为当前带来最节能的配置，同时提供了一个灵活的系统，该系统能够轻松修改以适应将来的用例。”