Built to Adapt: Designing Science Buildings for a Future That Won’t Sit Still
As science expands beyond traditional wet labs, buildings must support a wider range of research, technologies and tenants. This article explores strategies including zoned capacity, hybrid floorplates, convertible infrastructure and shared resources that enable facilities to adapt over time. It also examines the rise of "dark labs," the growing convergence of science and healthcare real estate, and why designing for continuous reuse—rather than a single tenant or discipline—is becoming essential to long-term resilience.
For decades, the commercial life-science market has been defined by a single dominant model: the speculative lab building optimized for chemistry and biology. That model is now under strain. Oversupply, shifting funding cycles and slower tenant demand are forcing owners and developers to reconsider not just who their buildings are for, but what those buildings can become over time.
At the same time, the nature of science is changing. Robotics, AI, advanced engineering and materials science don’t fit neatly into the traditional lab-office formula. Instead, these users require buildings that are part lab, part engineering shop, part computing hub and part infrastructure platform.
The question is no longer how to design a better lab building. It's how to design a building that can stop being a lab, and become something else entirely.
AI is driving performance needs to new heights:
Science is Changing. Buildings Must Change with It.
Today’s conversations around “tough tech” and hybrid science environments can feel new, but in reality, these building types have existed for years. What’s changed is the scale, urgency and visibility of demand.
Depending on the organization, today’s users may require higher structural capacity for heavy equipment and ultra-low vibration environments, a mix of wet labs, dry labs, clean rooms, computing and light manufacturing, and spaces that can evolve rapidly as research directions shift.
But increasingly, they also require something else: optionality. Conventional lab buildings—often built around a fixed lab-to-office ratio—are optimized for a narrow range of users. Though efficient, this model struggles to accommodate large-scale prototyping and robotics, engineering-driven research with evolving equipment needs, or manufacturing adjacencies like GMP, testing, and distribution.
This is not just a design challenge but a real estate challenge. Buildings designed for a single research type are more vulnerable to low utilization and harder to renovate when research needs shift. As science rapidly changes, flexibility is becoming as much about long-term asset resilience as scientific performance. What’s emerging instead is a different model: not a building designed for a single use, one designed for continuous reuse.
Shifting at Scale
Across NBBJ’s science portfolio, this adaptability is already taking shape in tangible ways. In one case, NBBJ partnered with a major institutional real estate owner to study how existing commercial buildings could be repositioned to support robotics and engineering-driven tenants, introducing higher floor-to-floor heights, greater structural capacity and integrated shipping and receiving to accommodate large-scale prototyping and heavy equipment. Similarly, for a prominent research-for-hire organization, we designed a facility that integrates wet labs, clean rooms and engineering-focused dry labs within a single environment, allowing teams to shift seamlessly between disciplines as project needs evolve.
This same thinking extends to academic science environments:
At Cornell University, flexible, infrastructure-rich environments support experimentation beyond traditional wet-lab density, while the Oxford University Life and Mind Building brings historically distinct disciplines—life sciences and cognitive research—together under one roof through a framework that fosters collaboration while accommodating very different technical demands.
At the University of Cambridge Materials Science and Metallurgy Building, 25 research groups are brought together in a highly adaptable environment shaped through shared facilities, flexible layouts and intensive user engagement, enabling the building to evolve alongside the science.
And at the Henry Royce Institute, University of Manchester, flexibility is embedded at both spatial and structural levels, from “write-up” zones that can convert into laboratories to a building designed for heavy equipment and ultra-low vibration demands that support emerging tough tech research.
Adaptability is also valuable beyond science. In markets like Boston, MA, underutilized lab buildings are being absorbed by healthcare institutions such as Massachusetts General Hospital and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, converting them into clinical, medical office and research space. What makes this possible is the very infrastructure that defines many lab buildings—robust mechanical systems, higher floor loading and vibration control—which can support a wider range of uses than many developers originally anticipated.
The Rise of “Dark Labs” and the New Spatial Economy
At the same time as organizations embrace a more flexible model for commercial science, a quieter shift is also underway—one that may fundamentally change how much space science actually needs. So-called “dark labs” describes environments where automation, robotics and AI reduce the need for continuous (or any) human presence.
In these spaces, experiments can run autonomously, monitoring can happen remotely, and energy and operational costs can be significantly reduced. The result is a new spatial economy: less space dedicated to repetitive or automated processes, more emphasis on decision-making and cross-disciplinary exchange, and a sharper distinction between industrialized research space and human-centered environments.
For designers and developers, this creates both a challenge and an opportunity: to design buildings that can support automation where it makes sense, while doubling down on the spaces that enable people to do what machines cannot.
Resilience Through Reinvention
For owners and developers, flexibility is increasingly synonymous with resilience. Buildings that can support multiple forms of science over time are better positioned to weather market shifts, funding cycles and changes in tenant demand.
The future of commercial science real estate will depend less on identifying the “right” tenant and more on designing buildings capable of supporting multiple forms of innovation over time. As science continues to diversify, the spaces that house it must do the same.
