Given that the Ferland Engineering Education and Design Center is nearing completion in heavily forested Maine, designers for a three-story, 108,000 sq-ft multi-use facility for the University of Maine’s Biomedical Engineering Program and the Dept. of Mechanical Engineering naturally considered mass timber for the frame. But the team ultimately determined that structural steel and concrete would not only maximize program space, but also offer a better solution for building wet labs for the center’s biology and chemistry departments that are sensitive to vibration. “Structural steel with concrete slabs on deck can be tuned to dampen those vibrations so you don’t have a blurred microscope, for instance,” says Ethan Rhile, vice president of Thornton Tomasetti, the project’s quality assurance quality control structural engineer. Structural steel also helped achieve a flexible building with classrooms, collaborative spaces, labs and constant rearrangement of classroom spaces—a goal for the project, Rhile says.
The design team worked closely with the faculty to develop specially configured lab furniture systems that provided a high degree of flexibility. Rendering courtesy of Ellenzweig