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.