New building to house nanotechnology research

By Edward Chiao
Daily Bruin Senior Staff
[email protected]

 

UCLA is getting a new state-of-the-art 180,000 square foot
Nanosystems building in the heart of the Court of Sciences.

The building, which will be built next to Boelter Hall, will
house the California Nanosystems Institute. The institute is one of
four California Institutes for Science and Innovation first
announced by Gov. Gray Davis in December of 2000.

The goal for the Nanosystems Institute is to develop a
multidisciplinary approach toward information, biomedical, and
manufacturing technologies on the nanometer scale.

Groundbreaking for the $70 million institute, which was funded
through private corporate partners and the state of California, is
set for early fall of this year. The target completion date is
winter 2004.

The building is part of a larger Nanosystems Institute project
with UCSB to build about 280,000 square feet of lab and office
space between the two campuses.

“We are in a situation where we are very
privileged,” said Professor Fraser Stoddart, Co-director of
CNSI. “We have a big investment from the state of California,
at a time when the subject (of nanosystems) is beginning to take
shape.”

When completed, the CNSI building will include seven levels
““ four of which will be built above the ground level of the
Court of Sciences.

The first three levels of the CNSI building will be built below
the Court of Sciences, adjacent to Parking Lot 9. The remaining
four floors will be built on top of the first three levels and the
pre-existing parking structure.

The two lower levels will house engineering and low-vibration
labs, along with an Integrated Molecular Systems facility and two
clean rooms. These new facilities will expand on UCLA’s
current silicon fabrication facility to include silicon processing
with biomolecules and physiologically active cells.

Because the CNSI building will be built over a parking
structure, the lower levels of the building were carefully designed
to minimize acoustic vibrations and low electrical noise, according
to Margo Reveil, technology integration manager with CNSI.

The third level will include a loading dock and laboratory space
for the Crump Molecular Imaging Institute, which will include
state-of-the-art facilities for bio systems and optical
imaging.

Like Boelter Hall, whose fifth floor acts as the main level,
CNSI’s fourth floor will open into the Court of Sciences. But
this is where the resemblance between the two buildings ends.

In the CNSI building, Levels 4-7 are divided into two parts,
allowing for a courtyard between the two sides. The skyways between
each side of the building also have open staircases for easy access
to any level of the building.

The idea behind the design is to create “dialogue”
between the researchers from different departments, and “to
become as mixed as possible,” according to Reveil.

The main level of CNSI will have a 260-seat auditorium and
enough floor space for an exhibition area, a seminar room, and
administration offices.

Right above the main floor, levels 5 and 7 will have uniquely
designed “open lab” space, sandwiching a level 6, which
will serve as an “interstitial” level capable of
providing lab services and handling future laboratory growth.

The “open labs” are modular-designed lab spaces with
enough resources to handle the demands of any type of experiment.
The lab spaces are not assigned to any groups in particular ““
rather, they can serve as incubator labs for corporate partners,
transforming on demand from a biology to a chemistry to an
electrical engineering lab.

Simply constructing another science building was never the
intention of the Institute’s co-founders, Professor James
Heath (UCLA) and Evelyn Hu (UCSB).

“Just building and just equipment doesn’t make a
program,” Hu said. “Our personal view is, the worst
thing is we have a building at UCLA and UCSB, but we have no
program.”

The building was designed to create an environment promoting
interaction between various disciplines.

The professors in the institute will have offices overlooking
the central courtyards. The sixth level will include central
conference rooms, along with indoor and outdoor interactive
spaces.

“The institute is a group of people with a mission, as
opposed to a department, which is a collection of people with their
own research projects,” Heath said.

“If you have a vision, a scientific direction you want to
go into, then that’s (the reason for) an
institute.”