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The Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering Complex (ISEC) is a 234,000 square-foot (21,700 m²) building at Northeastern University designed to provide an innovative environment for collaborative research, laboratory access, and classroom learning. The building is located on the University's central campus at 805 Columbus Ave, Boston, Massachusetts. The building initially opened on April 3, 2017.

ISEC
Exterior of ISEC in 2017
General information
Type	Research Facility, Classroom, Laboratory
Town or city	Boston, Massachusetts
Country	United States
Coordinates	42.3375066°N 71.0894076°W / 42.3375066; -71.0894076
Groundbreaking	February 21, 2014
Completed	April 3, 2017
Cost	$225 Million (2017)
Owner	Northeastern University
Technical details
Floor count	Six
Floor area	234,000 square feet (21,700 m2)
Design and construction
Architecture firm	Payette
Main contractor	Suffolk Construction

Description

The building has a multitude of small and large classrooms, laboratories, offices, conference rooms, kitchens, and a 280 sear auditorium.

History

Lobbying and protest

On April 4th 2017, the building had its official grand opening ceremony. Researchers, students, faculty, administrators, and executives of various research institutions attended the grand opening along with a protesting student environmental group, DivestNU.

DivestNU is a student organization that advocates for Northeastern's administration to divest the university’s endowments from the fossil fuel industry. During their outdoor demonstrations at the opening of the building, DivestNU members did things such as hold up tubes to symbolize oil pipelines.

The Northeastern University Police Department (NUPD) let the student protesters go inside as long as they did not hand out flyers. After getting in, the NUPD had to prevent them from handing out any posters at all inside. Eventually, the group was asked to leave ISEC building.

Architecture

Construction

The ISEC building was constructed for collaboration and cutting-edge research , with the theme of flow and movement in mind. The central body of the building consists of a large atrium that extends from the ground floor to the six-story ceiling. Much of the research space which borders this main atrium is completely visible to observers , allowing for high levels of transparency between the public and different disciplines.Open spaces of collaboration and "research on display" define much of the complex. Some features of the building include:

Offices and lab space to accommodate 700 faculty members and graduate students.

A central spiral staircase and conference spaces, lounges, and kitchenettes on five floors to encourage meetings and impromptu exchanges.

Wet and computational laboratories are which are co-located, and modular—fully adaptable to each research team’s needs.

Glass walls surrounding a six-story, sky-lit atrium put science on display—and foster a culture of transparency.

The ground floor doubling as a conference center, with a 280-seat auditorium, staging area, café, and room for 200 seated dinner guests.

More than 13,000 square feet of essential core facilities and tools at basement level to serve the university community: laboratories for genomics, metabolomics, and proteomics; functional nuclear magnetic resonance imaging; and electron microscopes.

Four modular 1,400-square-foot teaching classrooms with sliding glass walls, for faculty and students to share and display their work wirelessly.

ISEC was constructed on an urban brownfield site that was formerly a parking lot set between the Columbus Ave and Rennaisance Park Garages. Set between Boston's historic Roxbury and Fenway neighborhoods, The facility serves to connect two areas that were for the most part separated by the Amtrak and MBTA rail lines.

Sustainability

The ISEC is designed to use 75 percent less energy than a typical intensive research building (103 EUI) and will provide the University a projected 33 percent energy cost savings. Parametric design and energy modeling helped create a high-performance architectural form that, coupled with innovative energy recovery and conservation systems, drastically reduces building energy usage. The ISEC is tracking LEED Gold and complies with the 2030 Commitment energy reduction targets.

Arup was selected by the architecture firm Payette to provide mechanical, electrical, and plumbing engineering, as well as energy modelling, façade consulting, sustainability, and lighting design services for the project. Using advanced computer modelling to integrate the design of the building systems and façade, the design team significantly reduced operational costs and improved energy efficiency.

The cascade air system is the biggest contributor to energy savings at the ISEC. Laboratories have a dedicated HVAC system, an expensive feature to construct and operate. At the ISEC, the cascade system recovers conditioned air from the offices and atrium of the building, then transfers it to the lab, saving energy and reducing costs.

Arup designed a hydronic run-around coil system, recovering energy from the lab exhaust air to pre-condition the outdoor air, targeting the heating as needed to either the offices or labs, and optimizing the efficiency of the system. The coils are designed to minimize the size of the fan motor and extract as much energy as practical before the exhaust is discharged.

Using active chilled beam technology significantly reduces the energy consumption compared to conventional air conditioning. In this system, supply air to the space is directed through nozzles on either side of a heat exchanger coil, creating a pressure difference. This pressure difference pulls air from the space over the coil, cooling or heating it, and then mixes with the supply air to be delivered to the space.

To optimize the efficiency of the chiller and heating system, a heat-recovery chiller simultaneously generates hot water and chilled water. This reduces the run-time of the boilers for laboratory re-heat in the summer and shoulder seasons, and for the pre-heat of the domestic and laboratory hot water systems. The winter outdoor air heating demand to the atrium is reduced by using a passive solar collector to preheat the outdoor air using radiant energy from the sun.

Daylight and occupancy sensors, coupled with LED lighting, minimize energy usage, while large, carefully shaped skylights provide controlled daylight to labs. Low energy office space is oriented toward the south and west exposure and is shaded from the sun by a system of curved bronze sunshades attached to a triple glazed unitized curtain wall.

• 75% percent of construction waste will be diverted from landfills through recycling, reuse, or donation for use on another site.

• 62% cumulative shading reduction.

• 50% in actual energy savings when compared to an ASHRAE baseline building.

• 30-50% reduction in lighting power density (LPD) achieved with high efficiency light fixtures.

• 40% savings in energy costs when compared to an ASHRAE baseline building.

• 40% reduction in average water use through low-flow fixtures and a rainwater cistern for toilet flushing.

Influence and Impact

University Profile

Completion of the ISEC facility signifies a major shift in the culture, history, and trajectory of Northeastern University. According to the Boston Globe, "Northeastern has been reinvented in the past generation. A school in decline, best known for its work-study co-op program, has morphed into a thriving research university. Between 2006-16, its rank among US colleges and universities rose from 98th to 39th, as measured by US News & World Report. Last year, the school says, it received 50,000 applications for 2,300 places. Satellite campuses have opened in Seattle, Toronto, Charlotte, N.C., and San Jose, Calif. The co-op program, in which students spend some time on campus and some working at jobs elsewhere, is still the heart of the school. But it’s now called experiential learning, and co-op students come from and go all over the world." Once largely a commuter school, the university is making a large shift in increasing its research budget to become center of innovation and research that is on par with the nation's elite research colleges and universities, and the opening of ISEC marks a future of accelerating Northeastern's research momentum.

In the past ten years, the university's federal research funding has more than doubled, to the current $130 million a year, and Northeastern has hired 565 new tenured and tenure-track faculty in disciplines directly tied to its research goals since the 2006-2007 academic year.

The ISEC building represents a $225 million dollar piece of the $1.6 billion master plan for development proposed by Northeastern to the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA) in November of 2013.

Expansion Projects

Currently, the rail corridor that serves Amtrak, the Orange Line, and commuter trains makes walking or biking from one side to the other difficult, effectively isolating Northeastern's main campus from the Roxbury neighborhood. To combat this issue, the designers of ISEC have designed a new pedestrian which will extend from a corner of ISEC to the old campus of Northeastern, with accommodations for pedestrians and cyclists, and be open to the public. Scheduled to open in late 2018, the project aims to unite two areas which have previously been divided .

Research Projects

Human-centered robotics - This research group develops robots and assistive devices to empower people, improve health care, or ensure public safety. In partnership with NASA, researchers are programming a 6’2” humanoid, Valkyrie, to explore Mars as soon as 2030, ahead of human explorers.

Brain and cognitive health - This research uses virtual reality, computer modeling, and neuroimaging technologies, including fMRI, researchers design new ways to measure performance from youth to old age.

Cybersecurity and privacy - Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute researchers design techniques to safeguard data and strengthen critical wireless and cloud-network infrastructure against attack. 

Drug delivery and structural biology - This research team designs small molecules, the basis of new medicines to treat schizophrenia, among other devastating diseases. Sculpted at the atomic level, this project develops molecules which must fit cell targets precisely to avoid causing toxic side effects.

Translational biophotonics - This research cluster harnesses visible and near-infrared light rays to examine disease. To develop new optical technologies, engineers, physicists, and chemists collaborate with biologists and pharmaceutical scientists at Northeastern and medical experts at Boston’s world-class research hospitals.

See also

Northeastern University

External links

• Northearstern University's ISEC web page

• Payette's ISEC article

• bldup.com's section on ISEC

• ISEC pictures 4

• Architect magazine's ISEC article

• Boston Globe's article on the opening ofISEC

• Boston Globe's second article about ISEC

• Commercial Property Executive's article on ISEC

• World Architect's article on ISEC

• High Profile's article on the completion of ISEC