Center of Attention

By B. J. Almond

Collaborations with institutions from the Texas Medical Center have long been a mainstay of biosciences and bioengineering at Rice. And now, they’ll have a new home with the construction of the 477,000-gross-square-foot, 10-story Collaborative Research Center (CRC) at the corner of Main Street and University Boulevard.

The new facility will enable researchers and physicians from the world’s largest medical center to team up with Rice University scientists and engineers on bioscience and biotechnology research and complement one another’s capabilities. Although patients will not be treated at the CRC, they will benefit from new treatments developed there that will help transform the future of health care. Rice plans to relocate the Department of Bioengineering to the new building, along with select research groups from other departments.

The CRC plans call for eight floors of research laboratories in a tower atop a base platform that will include a vivarium, a 280-seat auditorium, a 100-seat seminar room, classrooms, 10,000 square feet of retail space for a restaurant and shops and other common space, as well as three levels of underground parking. The baseline plan also includes two stories of shell space to allow easy and rapid expansion as the project grows, along with the potential to build a second research tower atop the base platform that could add up to another 150,000 gross square feet. The building is being constructed on 2.9 acres of land owned by Rice, with occupancy scheduled for early 2009.

“The Collaborative Research Center is essential to achieving Rice’s Vision for the Second Century and assuring its position as a great research university,” says Rice President David W. Leebron. “This combination of the Texas Medical Center research institutions and Rice has the capacity to be one of the most powerful biomedical research efforts in the world, and this extraordinary research facility represents a major investment toward that goal. It will reap benefits for health care and for the city of Houston for decades to come.”

According to James Crownover, chairman of the Rice Board of Trustees, the CRC’s leadership role in biomedicine and biotechnology also will provide important benefits to the Houston economy. “Biotechnology is expected to be the No. 1 industry for job growth in Houston,” he says, “targeting 30,000 new jobs over the next five years.”

Although the CRC will be the largest academic building in Rice’s history, construction is on a fast-track schedule. Skidmore, Owings and Merrill is the executive and design architect, with a team led by principal design architect Craig Hartman. The building is being constructed by Linbeck. FKP Architects is the local associate architect. The CRC will meet Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design standards developed by the U.S. Green Building Council.

Texas Medical Center institutions participating in the CRC include Baylor College of Medicine, the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, the Methodist Hospital Research Institute, Texas Children’s Hospital and the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. Discussions are under way with other potential participants, including such international collaborators as Mexico’s Tecnológico de Monterrey.

For more information, visit collaborativeresearchcenter.org.

Want to watch the construction? Log on to facilities.rice.edu/ for photos and a webcam.