Transparent research building encourages collaboration

Project: TMC3 Collaborative Building
Award: Silver, Workspace Interiors - Corporate Offices (Over 10,000 SQM), 2024
Location: Houston, United States
Design practice: Elkus Manfredi Architects
Client: Texas Medical Center

Created to promote the cross-disciplinary connections that are critical to accelerating today’s lifesaving medical innovations, Elkus Manfredi Architects’ new biomedical research and translational science campus for Texas Medical Center (TMC), the TMC3 Collaborative Building, is an architectural manifestation of working together.

A curving terraced façade blurs the line between inside and out, while inside the building is a fluid ecosystem of flexible institutional and industry research facilities, intersecting pathways, and gathering spaces.

The judges singled out the central atrium, with its open layout, crisscrossing staircases and glass walls, saying, "this stands out as a spot where ideas can flow and encounters can happen, which might just accelerate medical breakthroughs. It's refreshing to see a balance of innovation and human-centric elements."

They added: "There is a focus on transparency through large open glazing partitions to labs and transparent balustrades to staircases and balconies - this ties neatly to the design ethos of open and sharing of ideas."

It is the first building and cornerstone of Texas Medical Center’s new TMC³ Helix Park campus, home of TMC and three founding institutions – MD Anderson Cancer Center, Texas A&M University Health Science Center (Texas A&M Health), and the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth Houston) as well as their academic and industry partners.

“The collaborative building represents an evolution from a mindset of ‘mine’, institutions conducting research behind closed doors, to a mindset of ‘ours', institutions working together to advance innovation. The building’s entire purpose is to bring the founding institutions together to be more powerful and innovative than in single silos. None of them had ever collaborated with anyone for research before, so this was a revolutionary idea,” the studio said.

Design highlights

The design of the building doesn’t separate researchers into their own labs, but instead co-locates them in fully equipped, highly flexible lab space, near promising startups and on-site organizations that offer seed capital and support.

The building’s four-storey central atrium, with its crisscrossing staircases and bridges with glass rails and glass walls along labs, is all about the exchange of ideas and putting science on display as the main event, not a secret behind closed doors. Occupants can see the science, on the big scale that the institutions bring, and in the small labs of the young start-ups.

Formal and informal collaboration areas sit on perches at different levels, and presentations happen at ground level.

“The entire environment contributes to one singular purpose: to connect all those in the building, from scientists and investors to data analysts and philanthropists, in one community focused on curing disease,” the studio said.

The building is grounded in human-centric design, with designers embedding health and wellness from the outset. It includes access to natural daylight, sky and park views, state-of-the art air handling systems, and a wide variety of choices in workspace types.