The concept for the design of Chu Hall at the University of California, Berkeley, was driven by the context of the site and the building's scientific use. The three-story, 39,125-square-foot structure's first floor, which is buried beneath a hillside on three sides and exposed on the sloping site, has a very large footprint with two smaller footprints above it.
Design connects research facility with rolling hills, neighboring building
Chu Hall is part of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and is a research facility devoted to alternative energy research. Designed by SmithGroupJJR, San Francisco, the building comprises three basic components. Suzanne Napier, AIA, vice president, Smith- GroupJJR says, “If you look at it, it’s like a large box under two smaller, stacked boxes.”
Describing the structure of the building, Napier adds, “The building is formed by the plinth, which is the base of the building; a breeze-way, which is the office level of the building; and the corona, which is the crown, or capping of the building.”
Reducing Vibration
The first floor contains low-vibration research laboratories. “The other thing that was very fundamental to the lab was to get as much slab on grade space as they could, because slab on grade allows you to be very robust with your vibration control,” Napier says. “The form is simple and cost-effective, and it’s a good use of maximizing floor plate.”
Above a portion of the underground first floor on the south side of the building is a courtyard Chu Hall shares with its neighbor. “It has a dual purpose; it’s a roof, it’s green roof and a courtyard,” Napier says. “So that was also part of developing the campus context with an outdoor, shared green area.”
Rolling Hills
The design team brought the outdoors inside with curtainwall, punched opening windows and skylights. “This is in the midst of a lot of rolling hills on the campus, and the concept was to sort of bring those rolling hills through the building in a conceptual way,” Napier says.
The second floor, at ground level, contains the main entrance and lobby on the east side and office space. It features Wausau Window and Wall Systems’ 7-foot-tall, floor-to-ceiling Superwall curtainwall at the perimeter along the northeast, south and west sides.
On the third floor, there is a band of glazing on the three sides where laboratories are located. The building has approximately 20 punched opening and operable windows on the second and third floors. The windows are sill height, 3 feet to 10 feet, where laboratories are located on the north and south sides of the building.
Lily Lai, project architect at Smith- GroupJJR, says there is a rigor to the placement of glazing on the laboratory sides due to its functionality for conducting scientific research. “And then as you break away and move to the east side, that rigidity breaks away and becomes more playful as you enter the lobby, which is a more public and neutral space that doesn’t require the rigidity based on functional floor locations and equipment locations,” she says.
Napier says they incorporated skylights into the design to reduce glare and provide an even light throughout the facility. C/S Erectors Inc. installed two types of skylights, one from Acralight International Skylights and LITEFLAM rectangular, linear skylights from Greenlite Glass Systems. They were installed at four locations: the lobby, two spaces between chemistry laboratories and a main hallway and a rooftop terrace that illuminates the first floor underground.
The LEED Gold-certified project also included Novato, Calif.-based SunTerra Solar Inc.’s rooftop photovoltaics and Starbuck, Minn.-based Solarskies Thermal Collectors’ solar hot water panels. “There are ties to when you’re thinking about solar energy research, utilizing the sun not just with photovoltaics and solar hot water panels, but also for daylight purposes,” Napier says.
Coordinating Materials
The third floor, which houses chemistry laboratories, is clad with 3A Composites USA Inc.’s Alucobond metal composite material panels in Pittsburgh-based PPG Industries Inc.’s Duranar XL Silver. “So then you get the separation of upper level chemistry and lower level instrumentation,” Lai says. “And then in the sandwich in the middle is the transparent public space. That provides the concept of the division of the building.”
Napier says metal is the most noticeable material on it. “But it’s balanced very nicely with the proportions of the glass used at the main level and the proportions of concrete that you just see at the west side,” she says. “I think it works really well with the landscape that comes through the building, how it sits on the ground plane of that.”
Lai says her firm coordinated with the design team working on the General Purpose Lab in a number of ways including discussing the orientation of the buildings and specifying complementary metal panels and colors. The General Purpose Lab is a slightly darker grey than Chu Hall. “We didn’t want to choose the same type, nor the same color of metal panel. We wanted them to be in the same family, but slightly different,” Lai says.
Napier says building materials contextualized Chu Hall on the campus. “This building design is in a similar family of surrounding buildings through its material use, but also through its shape and form,” she adds.
Chu Hall is the second project SmithGroupJJR has completed on Berkeley Lab’s campus; the first was the Molecular Factory, completed in May 2006. Concrete, metal and glass materials were used to build the Molecular Factory as well. “That project is now 10 years old, and it looks as good as it did on installation day,” Napier says. “So these buildings look very clean and very nice and very durable for a long time.”