UCSF's new stem cell building. Credit: Mark Citret, Bruce Damonte

The University of California at San Francisco opened in February a bold new $123 million building to house its stem cell research facility. The Ray and Dagmar Dolby Regenerative Medicine Building is an example of cutting edge architecture specifically designed to ramp up research productivity. “The point of the building is to accelerate the work we do here, and one way it does this is by creating neighborhoods where you have clusters of investigators working on similar problems,” says Arnold Kriegstein director of the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regeneration Medicine and Stem Cell Research, which will be housed in the new facility. One design strategy for achieving this goal was to have open bench laboratory areas. The building's roughly 300 scientists and technicians would share the same work space and equipment even if they were working on different areas of research. The result says Kriegstein is “the feeling that this is just one large enterprise.” Another design innovation to create a sense of working intimacy was a split-level, open glass, partition design that effectively makes the four floors of the building only half a floor apart. “The open stairways and glass partitions allow for a seamless floor-to-floor relationship,” is how Kriegstein describes it. Fetal surgeon Tippi MacKenzie, for instance, shares laboratory space with another group studying placental biology, a proximity that creates a synergy for exploring how implanted maternal stem cells might treat diseases while a child is still in the womb.