Adaptive Reuse Projects Reduce Embodied Carbon and Capture Recognition

Adaptive reuse of buildings into lab space was on the agenda at the I2SL Annual Conference in St. Louis this year—and on the awards stage as well. Architects highlighted several examples of new uses for old buildings during conference sessions, and two adaptive reuse projects earned excellence awards as part of the I2SL Sustainable Laboratory Awards program. These innovative efforts include reuse of a printing plant in St. Louis; two old halls converted to lab space at Carleton College in Minnesota; and a United Therapeutics facility that reused an old field house in Research Triangle Park (RTP), Noth Carolina.

As the conference kicked off, one of the highlights of the Opening Plenary was a presentation by HOK about a project they supported at 4340 Duncan Avenue in St. Louis. As part of the Cortex Innovation District, which was designed to revitalize a declining neighborhood with university research expansion and innovative commercial enterprises, this project turned an old printing press into a multi-tenant lab and office building. A total of 37 percent of the 80,000-square-foot building was converted to lab space, requiring structural changes, ventilation improvements, and emergency back-up power.

The plant, which printed the St. Louis Post-Dispatch until the 1970s, was home to the first rotogravure press in the area, putting it on the National Register of Historic Places. This status posed a number of historic preservation challenges, but the fact that the building had different floor-to-ceiling heights on each level worked to the team’s advantage when designing the lab space and creating infill. They even kept some of the historic equipment in the space as part of a unique mezzanine for lab tenants to appreciate the building’s history, while significantly reducing the embodied carbon that would be associated with building materials required for new construction.

Two adaptive reuse projects were honored during the Sustainable Laboratory Awards ceremony at the conference. The first, the Evelyn M. Anderson Hall at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, won an award in the Buildings and Projects category for Excellence in Decarbonization and Building Reuse. Completed in 2020 with design support from Page, the building includes 117,000 square feet of renovated area and 58,000 square feet of new space. Anderson Hall was constructed in the footprint of a demolished building attached to the envelopes and structural members of two existing buildings, Mudd Hall and Hulings Hall, which were modernized and repurposed to create an integrated complex.

In addition to reusing more than two-thirds of the facility’s footprint, the exterior materials used in construction of Anderson Hall incorporated local Minnesota granite and limestone coupled with blended brick and glass, which have less embodied carbon and environmental impact. Even with a 33 percent increase in total square footage, energy-efficient measures incorporated in the project decreased overall energy consumption from 40 million British thermal units (BTU) in the original building to 23.5 million BTU in the new design, a 41 percent reduction. A geothermal central plant conversion and wind turbines both saved energy and reduced greenhouse gas emissions by 68 percent compared to a 2008 baseline for the original facility.

The Sustainable Laboratory Award winner for Excellence in Resilience and Renewable Energy, United Therapeutics’ Project Lightyear in RTP, included adaptive reuse of an existing field house, which was about 7 percent of the overall project square footage. The project team—supported by DPR Construction, Affiliated Engineers, and Hanbury—was able to reuse 70 percent of the existing structure and envelope elements and 60 percent of the interior materials, as well as site vegetation.