Holabird & Root was commissioned by North Central College to design a 125,000-square-foot Science Facility for its 150-year-old campus.

The program contains flexible general-purpose classrooms, instructional labs and research labs, collaboration spaces, and offices to support chemistry, environmental science, physics, biology, ecology, anatomy and physiology, and computer science.

Through a series of mock scheduling exercises, Holabird & Root was able to reduce the requested number of teaching labs and classrooms to meet the new budget criteria, while still providing enough teaching spaces to support the College’s curriculum.

The facility was designed to foster an interdisciplinary community by creating common spaces that encourage informal interactions across disciplines, while teaching and research spaces support active, hands-on inquiry.