L-shaped USB to house innovative classrooms, labs

With innovative classrooms for science courses and a bulls-eye central location, the new Undergraduate Science Building (USB) promises to be a popular choice for both students and faculty when it opens about a year from now.

Richard Hume, chair of the Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology, gives a tour of the new Undergraduate Science Building. (Photo by Martin Vloet, U-M Photo Services)

The $61-million USB is the final piece of the three-building life sciences complex built on the site of the old North University Building next to the Central Power Plant.

Its pink-faced "loft-style" exterior on three sides matches the two other buildings on the site, the Life Sciences Institute and the Palmer Commons. USB's north side is entirely glass, mimicking the Power Center for the Performing Arts and the Medical School's Biomedical Science Research Building being built on Washtenaw at Glen.

In addition to a lecture hall and traditional teaching labs, the building will feature new studio classrooms that allow lectures and bench work in the same class period, and two "dinner theatre" rooms that the team of faculty, architects and contractors working on the building have taken to calling Michigan rooms.

"People call those case study rooms 'Harvard Case Study Rooms,' so we thought, why doesn't Michigan have its own room?" says Victor Cardona, principal architect on the project for the SmithGroup of Detroit.

Two Michigan rooms on the building's first floor feature fixed tables for four students set on risers that form a semicircle around the teacher. The design is intended to facilitate active learning for about 100 students in which the professor might show a slide or two or lecture briefly, but then the students cluster in small groups to discuss problems or perform simple "kit" experiments.

Two Michigan Rooms on the first floor of the USB will include semi-circular tables, flat-panelled monitors and a series of risers. The rooms will hold about 100 students each and are intended to facilitate active learning. (Photo by SmithGroup Inc.)

"I think they are really going to be in demand," Richard Hume, chairman of the Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology, said during a hard-hat tour of the building. "Everybody I talk to says, 'Yeah, I'd like to try teaching that way.'"

The USB's first floor also will house offices for the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program, Women in Science and Engineering, and the Life Sciences and Society Program, formerly known as the Life Sciences Values and Society Program.

To get more square footage on the tight building footprint, the building's second through fourth floors are cantilevered to the north and west. This also makes a semi-covered walkway for pedestrians taking the new shortcut that connects the Hill residence halls directly with Washington Street.

At the elbow of the
L-shaped building, which the contractors have taken to calling "the knuckle," an oversized staircase sweeps up from the first to second floors. At the top of those stairs, there will be a spacious Resource Center with computers and small meeting rooms for student groups and for "just hanging out," Hume said.

The second and third floors will feature teaching laboratories and seminar classrooms, a 190-seat auditorium, and a small plant-growing room. It's not quite a greenhouse because it falls into the shadow of the Life Sciences Institute for about one month a year, Cardona explained.

The teaching labs on the second and third floors are more spacious than what biology students have been accustomed to in the oldest part of the Chemistry Building. The new labs also include more support space and supply storage, Hume said.

"The real luxury is just having a couple of new labs that don't belong to any one course, so we can experiment some," he said. "Right now, the only way to add a lab course is to ask somebody to drop one."

The fourth floor will house teaching labs for undergraduate and graduate neuroscience programs.

Most of the rooms on the west side of the building, facing the Fletcher Street "Top of the Park" parking structure, offer a picture-postcard view of the Burton Memorial Tower rising over the Alumni Center.

The exterior is mostly finished, and everything is on schedule to open the 140,000-square-foot building at the start of Winter Term 2006, U-M project manager Bryan Valachek says.