TMC3 Collaborative Building

Agency: Elkus Manfredi Architects
Client: Texas Medical Center

Texas Medical Center (TMC) wanted to make more alliances for today’s translational science, and asked Elkus Manfredi Architects to create a master plan for a new biomedical research and translational science campus. The result is TMC³ Helix Park, home of TMC and the 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) – plus their academic and industry partners in biopharmaceuticals, big data, venture capital, medical device and bioscience startups, incubators, and accelerators. Welcoming all with its curving terraced façade blurring the line between inside and out, the building is a fluid ecosystem of flexible institutional and industry research facilities, intersecting pathways, and gathering spaces. The building’s central atrium is an expression of open innovation, dismantling of silos, and collaboration reaching across the multiple research areas of the building.

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. If science doesn’t translate into medicine, it's just an idea, it's not going to save patients’ lives. 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 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 in translational medicine. Placing hospital-based research near scientists working in biotech and pharma companies, and creative scientific work with business minds that can bring solutions to market, creates a fluid ecosystem that accelerates discovery and life-saving therapies. Other design strategies used to create the building’s connected environment come together in the four-story atrium, the high-energy ‘hive’ of the building. With its crisscrossing staircases and bridges with glass rails and glass walls along labs, the atrium 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. A model of connectivity, resiliency, and inclusion, the TMC3 Collaborative Building is designed for LEED Silver certification. The building first and foremost is grounded in human-centric design, with designers embedding health and wellness well before programming was finalized – access to natural daylight everywhere, sky views, the park outside, state-of-the art air handling systems, and a wide variety of choices in workspace types.