Members of the design-build team for the new $32 million Robert W. Plaster Free Enterprise and Research Center located on the campus of UMKC, were the feature presenters at this month’s Kansas City chapter of DBIA-MAR luncheon.
Patrick Kantor and Matt Jones, project managers at The Whiting-Turner Contracting Company; Dan Phelan, PE, director of operations for Ross & Baruzzini KC office; and Marc Tower, vice president of business development for Citadel Electric Group, Inc., led the discussion on how its team designed and built the project with the intention of displaying science.
The 57,800-SF facility, located at the corner of Rockhill Road and East 51st Street, houses the UMKC School of Computing and Engineering and state-of-the-art research labs available to the community. It stands on what used to be a university maintenance building and machine shop.
The five-story facility was opened for student use in the fall of 2020 and to the public in October 2021.
The design-build team was awarded the project in March 2018 and began demolition and site work before the final design was completed in March 2019. Kantor said this allowed the team to save six months of time on the project.
The interdisciplinary research to be conducted within the building drove the design process, according to Kantor.
“There’s a collaboration that happens between all these various pieces of equipment. It was our job early on not only to set up the building to establish these relationships and adjacencies, but that presented a lot of challenges. You have a highly-sensitive, clean room with a structural testing lab where you’re breaking things and generating a lot of noise. So it was kind of a balance of how do you ensure that these spaces can work together but at the same time, you’ve got to separate some of the critical issues,” Kantor said.
The building is adjacent to Flarsheim Hall, and Flarsheim’s exterior is exposed in the new building. Because the new building had to line up with Flarsheim, the team had less clearance to work with than in a typical lab building, said Phelan.
Kantor said the first floor of the building was designed for heavy access. It contains a structural testing lab and a clean room with an electron microscope. Jones said the electron microscope took a week to install because the team had to minimize vibration generated from the traffic on Rockhill Road.
Among the amenities on the second floor is a virtual reality showroom containing $3 million of new virtual reality and augmented reality equipment.
Tower said it was important to the university that the VR space have future adaptability. The room is black. Tower said they had to find specially made black light fixtures, and the screens were the first of that type installed in North America.
Among the features on the third floor are a high-performance computer lab, a motion capture lab and an unmanned systems lab.
“So this space on the third floor, where its theme is to video human motion and also have unmanned systems, is basically a lab where you can go in and fly a drone up and down. So there’s an opening on the level 4 slab that allows you to stand on level 3 and see up to the roof deck on level 5 and fly drones up and down and catch the opening at level 3,” said Jones.
The fourth floor houses a renewable energy lab. Directly above the renewable energy lab is a renewable energy roof deck.
“This combined space will allow the study of different types of sustainability,” said Jones.
Other resources within the building include a 3D printing lab, a flight simulator approved by the Federal Aviation Administration, a high bay structural lab, a student team fabrication shop for students to collaborate on projects and student study spaces.
The site was really tight, so being efficient and maximizing the amount of space was critical, Kantor said. The team found creative uses for normally lost square footage, using every nook and cranny to create student hangout space.
“Sometimes when you’re on a fixed budget and you’re trying to pack this much program into a building, and we have a fixed footprint, there were just a lot of things working against us,” Phelan said.
One of the design criteria set by UMKC was to create transparency. Because UMKC wanted the north side of the building to be the main focal point entrance, there is a lot more glass on that side.
“They wanted science on display, teaching research on display, actually wanted the mechanical room on display. . . . There are windows from the corridors looking in, and we made sure that the most prominent features were pointed toward the glass so students could see all the guts of the building and what goes into a sustainable building,” Phelan said.