muderphudder t1_jeep70l wrote
Reply to comment by cmc in Memorial Sloan Kettering Files Plans For 594ft 31-Story Skyscraper At 1233 York Avenue On Manhattan’s Upper East Side by maybeitwasmee
>the structure could rise up to 594 feet tall and yield nearly 1 million square feet of facilities for cancer care, surgery, and medical research.
Hospital and research labs require floor plans, infrastructure, and safety precautions that you can't economically tack onto existing commercial office buildings even if there was an appropriately sized existing building in the immediate area.
dvd_man t1_jef01po wrote
Ya not true. Every university campus on earth has buildings retrofitted for research labs. It’s not always pretty but it’s most certainly doable. But administrators love their pet construction projects and legacy buildings.
barbaq24 t1_jef8xi2 wrote
The cost of those lab conversions in NYC are pretty eye watering but the cost of the construction isn’t the biggest driver of organization looking at new buildings. It’s all these new energy laws for New York. Labs require a ton of energy to run for gases, fume hoods, air exchanges, computing etc.. The building energy use ratings for converted labs are hanging heavy on these organizations. It’s all happening pretty fast with Local Law 97. Even if you built a new building that opened last year, if you have natural gas or a cogen unit your outdated.
Not to mention the compromises that New York labs make when converting old spaces. It’s not the same as most labs in the country. You have serious coordination issues with all the services and you pretty much reduce the average space design of a lab by 30% compared to the global benchmark. So you end up building a $2-4k/sqft lab with 30% less space than your experts told you it should be. Or you address the renewable energy issues, build the right floor heights, design the building for labs with have a proper utility core and make the spaces 20% smaller than recommended, all while building for around $1800/sqft when you include all the nonlab spaces of a new building.
Its a complex issue that a lot of folks are trying to address. So while lab conversions are thing, everyone complains about them, they are expensive, and they cost even more to run because of the cities energy conservation requirements.
dvd_man t1_jefa1eb wrote
fair enough. thanks for the information.
chestercat2013 t1_jef7awt wrote
The city has some fairly strict regulations around research labs because the city is so densely populated. Newer buildings can, for example, store more flammable solvents safely under the fire code (which is more strict than EPA regulations).
Ventilation in the buildings, especially one doing heavy research in a city, must also be extensive. The building I did my graduate research in was updating ventilation for the entire duration of my degree and it still wasn’t working well.
dvd_man t1_jefa2lx wrote
all good points. thanks for sharing.
pixel_of_moral_decay t1_jeeuxym wrote
That’s not really true. Hospitals extend into commercial office space all the time. NYU took over at least one or two office towers for ambulatory care several years ago. Some floors feel like being in a hospital if you didn’t know where you were. They do all sorts of procedures and stuff in them.
And there’s lots of medical labs in office buildings. You absolutely can put them there unless you’re working with something the government heavily restricts like anthrax research, but that’s not normal.
muderphudder t1_jeeyye4 wrote
Inpatient units and full OR suites are a bit of a different beast.
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