University of Chicago begins site preparations for $180 million science building

Site preparations are under way for the largest science building in the history of the University of Chicago.

The Interdivisional Research Building will bring together scientists from the biological sciences and the physical sciences to conduct research at the tiniest of scales. The building will encompass 420,000 square feet on East 57th Street and Drexel Avenue. But much of the research conducted in the new building will occur at the nanoscale, the scale of atoms and molecules.

“This is working at a scale where physics, chemistry and biology all merge, where problems have large overlap. The subjects don’t divide so easily when you get down to that scale,” said Robert Zimmer, Vice President for Research and for Argonne National Laboratory.

Nanotechnology research in the new building will be among activities at the University that will bolster the City of Chicago’s New Economy Growth Strategy. Complementing the University’s research in the new building will be Argonne’s nanoscience capabilities. Argonne is the home of the Advanced Photon Source, the world’s most powerful source of X-rays. Scientists from around the world use the APS to probe the microstructure of solid materials.

Even as demolition and excavation on the IRB site begins this summer, Zimmer foresees new collaborations unfolding between scientists at the University and Argonne National Laboratory. The University operates Argonne for the U.S. Department of Energy.

“The capacity not just to understand what’s happening on the nanoscale, but to fabricate at the nanoscale seems to offer vast potential for technological innovation,” Zimmer said.

With a price tag of approximately $180 million, the building will be the most expensive in the University’s history, partly because of its sheer size. “It’s an unusually large building,” Zimmer said. “It’s as if we were building two or three buildings at once.”

The building will provide offices and laboratories for approximately 100 faculty members when it opens in 2004. The IRB will house the Institute for Biophysical Dynamics as well as the Materials Research Science and Engineering Center, both of which include scientists from the Biological and Physical Sciences divisions. Also relocating into the IRB from the Physical Sciences are faculty members in the James Franck Institute and the Chemistry Department. From the Biological Sciences will come the Biochemistry & Molecular Biology Department, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigators and faculty researchers in the Ben May Cancer Research Institute.

This combination of biological and physical scientists working together under one roof is perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the building, said Donald Levy, the Albert Michelson Distinguished Service Professor in Chemistry.

“Traditionally, that never happened anywhere. Now it is an idea whose time has come,” Levy said. “Everybody is building a building that will have biological and physical scientists together, but ours will be a more major undertaking, which will involve a larger group of scientists and more laboratory space, than any other similar project.”

Steven Sibener, the Carl William Eisendrath Professor in Chemistry and Director of the James Franck Institute, will be among the physical scientists relocating to the IRB from the Research Institutes building.

“The science we do on campus is going to be profoundly influenced by the new building,” Sibener said. “It’s not just going to be new digs. It’s going to change what we do in just a very few years, and it’s going to be for the better.”