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ABOUT THE INSTITUTE
News of the JFI
University of Chicago begins site preparations
for $180 million science building
August 1, 2001
Click
here to view the website for the new 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.”
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