Technical · Reference design T-05
Modular Laboratories & R&D Facilities
Modular laboratories are buildings, not benches. This one is drawn from your equipment list, made on your ground from precision components, and the line around the fit-out is agreed before anything is ordered.
Decision Rooms
Four decisions that shape the building
Fit-out split
Where the building stops and the furniture begins
Benches, fume cupboards, safety cabinets, sinks, gas points and instruments can sit inside one order or three. Both arrangements are ordinary; what is not ordinary is leaving it unsaid, because the fit-out usually has the longest lead time on the project and the shortest patience with a late decision. Settle the split before anybody prices anything.
The split also changes who coordinates. If the benches are yours, the building is drilled and serviced to a layout you own and freeze; if they are inside our order, the layout is frozen with us instead. Either way the freeze date matters more than the split does, because after it every change is a variation with a date attached.
Containment
Whether the work needs a level, and who sets it
If your work requires a containment level, your biosafety adviser sets it, the design is written to their requirement and the room is tested against it by people we do not appoint. We make no claim of adequacy for any level on this page, for any building. A supplier who does so before reading your risk assessment is guessing with your licence.
Service spine
Where the services run decides where you can grow
Gas, water, drainage, power, data and extract all have to reach every bench, and the route they take is the one thing in a laboratory that is genuinely hard to move later. Decide where the spine runs and which direction the building may extend in on the same afternoon, because the second answer is contained in the first.
Who commissions
The handover tests, and the names against them
Somebody has to prove the extract works, the gas lines hold, the interlocks behave and the building performs as the brief asked. Whether that is your project manager, an appointed commissioning engineer or a specialist for one system, it is agreed at the start and written down. Otherwise it becomes a conversation on the day the first user wants the keys.
Commissioning proves the building, not the science. Airflow at the face of a cupboard, a gas line holding pressure, an interlock behaving, a drain falling the right way: these are testable, they are witnessed, and they are recorded. What happens at the bench afterwards belongs to your people and your procedures, and no supplier should be selling you a share of it.
The plot a laboratory needs
A laboratory asks more of its plot than an office does. Deliveries arrive on pallets and some of them are heavy; cylinders need a store outside with its own access; waste needs a route out that does not cross the way people come in; plant needs somewhere to sit within reach of a maintenance van. None of that is visible in a photograph of a bench.
The approach is where the building shows what kind of laboratory it is. A teaching or analytical facility is walked into by people carrying notebooks. A process development building is entered beside a goods door wide enough for a skid. The plan follows the traffic, and the traffic follows your work rather than a template.
On a campus there is a further question, which is what the new building has to match. Levels, service connections, access control, the fire strategy and the way the estate is maintained are all inherited from the site around it. They are project inputs, they are collected in the survey, and they are usually the reason a standard layout stops being standard.
How the building goes up
Watch it go up and the order is legible. Steel is fabricated to the drawing and erected on your ground; wall and roof components, ceilings, doors and glazing reach the plot flat and banded; each is fixed in the sequence the drawing sets. Nothing habitable travels, and no part of the envelope is poured in place.
For a research building the useful part of that method is the second fit-out. Services in a laboratory are altered more often than in almost any other building type, and a dry-fixed panel comes off and goes back. A wall that was cast, chased and made good three times stops being a wall worth keeping.
Finishes are specification, not identity, and this page names none. This building has been assigned no material family. What the walls, ceilings and floors are faced in is chosen against your cleaning regime, your chemicals and your estate’s standards, and it belongs in the quotation rather than in an assumption made here.
Where the work actually happens
Everything inside starts from the equipment list. What is being done, with what, at what scale and by how many people at once decides bench length, the position of extract, the number of service points and whether an instrument needs its own room because of vibration, heat or the noise it makes. The list is the brief; the plan is its consequence.
Wet work and write-up want to be near each other and never in the same place. A researcher moves between a bench and a screen several times an hour, so the two zones sit adjacent with a clear boundary — a glazed line, a change of level, a corridor — and the boundary is worth arguing about early, because it is the part of a laboratory people complain about later.
Storage is the quiet failure. Consumables, samples, solvents, gas cylinders and waste each want a different place with a different set of rules, and a plan that leaves them until last ends up with all of them in a corridor. They belong on the first sketch, sized from your own consumption rather than from an assumption.
Where the service spine reaches a bench
C01
The extract drop above the bench line
The service spine and the bench line
The fourth panel follows the spine. Gas, water, drainage, power, data and extract run together along one route, high or low, exposed where maintenance wants them reachable and boxed where a procedure wants them clean. Everything else in the room is arranged against that line, which is why it is drawn before the benches are.
Where the spine meets a bench there is a drop: taps, a gas point, sockets at the back of the working surface, and a labelled isolation valve within reach of the person using it. The same drop repeats along the run, which is what makes a bench line extendable rather than bespoke.
Above it the extract comes down to the cupboard or the canopy it serves, and the duct route back to the plant is the reason the ceiling is the height it is. A laboratory ceiling is not a decision about proportion; it is the space the extract needs, made visible.
The buyer’s folio
The facilities lead’s folio
Four short chapters for a facilities lead: what this page means by a laboratory, how an equipment list becomes a plan, how the building rises on your site, and what the two sides agree before a quotation is written.
01A building, not the furniture in itThe line this page draws first, what a laboratory demands of its plot, and why the word is used for two different things.
Search for this and two different products wear one phrase. Some of the results sell laboratory furniture — benches, workstations, casework — and describe it as modular, which it is. The others sell buildings. Both are legitimate; reading a page and not knowing which one you are on is not, and it is why this page opens where it does.
Two different products wear one phrase. This is the building around the work.
Here it means the building: structure, envelope, roof, doors, internal walls, ceilings, finishes and the servicing routes drawn to your layout. What stands on the floor when the work starts is a separate list with a separate owner, and that list is agreed rather than assumed.
A laboratory asks more of its plot than an office does, and none of it shows in a photograph.
IN SHORT — The building is ours; the benches and instruments are a separate list with a named owner.
02The work decides the planHow an equipment list becomes a servicing drawing, why wet and dry work separate, and what a laboratory is judged on later.
Some years in, a laboratory is judged on whether the services reached the bench somebody actually installed. That is why the servicing drawing follows the equipment list rather than the other way round, and why a layout frozen before the instruments are chosen usually has to be opened again at the worst possible moment.
The equipment list is the brief. The plan is its consequence.
Where your list is provisional, the building is drawn to the biggest layout it might end up carrying, and the assumption is set down in the quotation in ordinary language instead of hiding inside a figure. It is revisited when the equipment order closes, which is normally later than anybody planned for.
Wet work and write-up want to be near each other and never in the same place.
IN SHORT — Bench, extract, service point and store — all of them sized from your list, none of them from ours.
03Made on site, from componentsA steel frame, panels screwed dry, and the spine that every bench in the building hangs off.
A licensed professional on your project engineers the structure and its fixings to the loads your engineer sets, including any instrument heavy or delicate enough to change them. No span, load or deflection figure appears here. The number that matters is calculated against your ground and signed.
Services in a laboratory change more often than in almost any other building.
Beside the drawings we draw up a fit-out and services register with you before anything is ordered. Extract, ventilation, gas, water, drainage, power, data, fire detection and access control take one set of rows; benching, cupboards, safety cabinets, sinks, taps, shelving and loose equipment take another. Each row carries one owner, and exclusions are stated as exclusions.
A laboratory ceiling is the space the extract needs, made visible.
IN SHORT — One method, one spine, two lists — and every row carrying the name of whoever owns it.
04What is settled before anything is madeWhat commissioning actually proves, the inputs a quotation needs, when the sheets are drawn, and the claims we will not make.
The inputs are few and specific. The equipment list with services and heat, the number of people working at once, whether a containment level applies and who set it, gases and waste, the site or campus survey, the fit-out split you want, and the date the first user expects to be working.
Commissioning proves the building, not the science.
Two figures come from the group that manufactures these components: a hundred projects and more, and sixty to ninety days on site once assembly starts. Both are restated for each building when we quote. Neither is a laboratory statistic, and neither includes the commissioning and approval that follows.
What a facilities lead can hold us to today is narrower and firmer: the boundary between the building and the fit-out, the position on containment, the list of exclusions that applies to every project of this kind, and the order in which the decisions have to be taken. Those do not change with the design.
No supplier should be selling you a share of what happens at the bench.
We do not claim a research building can only be made this way. The argument for making the components off site and the building on your ground is a campus that cannot take a long wet programme beside occupied laboratories, a remote site, and a fit-out that will be altered again within a few years.
IN SHORT — Seven inputs, one register and no invented figure — sheets follow the selected design.
Questions worth asking any supplier
Do you supply the benches, fume cupboards and instruments?
Only what your order says. The building — structure, envelope, roof, internal walls, ceilings, finishes and the servicing routes drawn to your layout — is ours by default. Benching, cupboards, safety cabinets and instruments are a separate list that can sit inside the same order or beside it. The register names one owner against every line.
Can you build to a containment level?
We build to the requirement your biosafety adviser writes, and we claim nothing about adequacy for any level on this page. The level is set from your risk assessment, the design is written against it, and the room is tested by people we do not appoint. Ask any supplier who answers differently to show you the assessment.
What extract, gas and water capacity does the building have?
Whatever your schedule states, because the schedule comes first. Capacity is an output of a design that starts from your equipment list, not a property of a building type, and no figure for it appears on this page. Send the list and the servicing drawing is produced against it rather than against a guess.
Can it be extended once we are working in it?
That is decided now rather than then, because the extension direction is fixed by where the service spine runs. Say at the briefing how much more you may need and which way the site allows you to grow; the spine is then drawn for the larger building and the phase you fund today stops where you want it to.
What turns up at our gate?
Flat-packed material and nothing else: framing members, wall and roof components, ceilings, doors, glazing units, fixings and finishes, banded, labelled and sequenced for erection. The building is put together on your plot. If the fit-out is inside our order it follows the building rather than travelling with it, on its own lead time.
What should we be sent first?
The equipment list with services and heat, how many people work at once, the containment position and who set it, gases and waste, your site or campus survey, the fit-out split, and the date the first user expects the keys. That list is enough to begin with.