The project team also includes AEI (mechanical, engineering, and plumbing design), KPFF (structural and civil engineering), PLACE (landscape design), and general contractor Andersen Construction .
The $213 million complex will hold a teaching center and space for specialized, team-based research in areas such as climate science, clean energy and water resources. The top two floors will be for experimental and computational research, while the ground floor will be designated for signature/special research. Student programmed space and cross-functional collaborative spaces designed to advance research will be located throughout the complex.
The building’s ground floor will hold a supercomputer and an associated heat recovery system that will result in significant reductions in energy demand and operation costs, lead architect Vlad Pajkic stated in an email. Other ground-floor features will include a 10,000-square-foot clean room, a cyber-physical playground, an extended reality theater, a state-of-the-art water lab, and an indoor/outdoor makerspace.
The Huang Collaborative Innovation Complex will be located at the campus’ northernmost edge.
“The building’s height, proportion, massing, materials and facades adapt at each frontage to harmonize with the existing building fabric of the university’s historic district and the broader Corvallis community,” Pajkic stated.
The flexible wet and dry laboratories will be on the two upper stories in a bar shape. Along Monroe Avenue, one and two-story volumes with varied setbacks will hold a collection of research support spaces with active and public-facing programs. The OSU campus is unified by brick facades. The building’s rich articulation of smooth and textured brick coursing is derived from this campus characteristic, Pajkic stated.
The complex is designed to be a welcoming, shared and flexible space that fosters collaboration between research, education and the broader community, according to Pajkic. Transparency, daylight and exposed wood will create an inviting interior environment.
The Huang Collaborative Innovation Complex will be the world’s first all-mass-timber lab that meets a rigorous vibration standard of 2,000 microinches per second (mips), according to ZGF.
“Lab buildings typically utilize a concrete structure to achieve the necessary stiffness, but the project team was able to meet this rigorous vibration criteria with a mass-timber structure the first lab to do so in the United States,” Pajkic stated.
This was achieved by the composite action of mass-timber beams, cross-laminated timber decking and a concrete topping slab, Pajkic stated. The building’s structural stability will allow the use of sensitive scientific equipment.
The project’s design team collaborated with a wood manufacturer and university testing labs to use locally sourced mass-plywood panels for primary structural members, fulfilling OSU’s sourcing and equity desires.
The university has campus-wide sustainability goals, and several strategies were employed in the design to achieve energy efficiency, Pajkic stated. Those include the use of cascading air ventilation in labs, electrochromic glazing and photovoltaic panels.
“One of the biggest drivers for major decarbonization efforts on campus lies within its nearby energy district plant,” Pajkic stated.
The Kelley District Utility Plant is expected to be completed by 2026, according to OSU . “The KDUP will contain a chilled water loop system to supply cooling to all connected buildings, which is important even during the winter months due to the high volume of heat-generating equipment in these facilities,” OSU states on its website.
The energy exported from the supercomputer when combined with rooftop solar energy generation could result in a 58 percent reduction in energy use for the project before any energy efficiency strategies are applied to the lab, office and other programming, according to ZGF.
“The supercomputer’s energy export accelerates the carbon savings of the campus plant upgrades and greening of the utility grid to potentially make this building net zero operational carbon on an annual basis by 2030 and be a significant net exporter of carbon to the campus after that,” Pajkic stated.
The project team is targeting to complete construction in fall 2026.
On the Boards is a DJC feature offering a look at projects in Oregon and Southwest Washington being tackled by local architecture firms. To have your firm’s projects considered, contact DJC reporter Hilary Dorsey at hdorsey@djcOregon.com.
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