Case Studies March 2023

Karren Jamaca was working for the biotechnology company Fluidigm (now Standard BioTools) when an explosion on a neighboring floor rocked the company’s offices. Flames engulfed the upstairs tenant’s chemical hood, setting off overhead sprinklers, which sent sooty toxic chemicals raining down on Fluidigm’s server room and multiple laboratories with delicate biomedical equipment. Contaminated water flooded […]

When most students eat their school-issued lunches, they don’t know where the food comes from. Typically, they can assume it’s been mass-produced, frozen or canned. Students at Santa Clara Unified School District, however, don’t need to guess. Their food is grown on campus. “We run a farm here where we grow the food ourselves, harvest […]

By now, examples of the economic tolls caused by climate change have become all too obvious: ramped-up water use by farmers to save their crops from droughts; billions of dollars in damages to towns torched by wildfires; lost tourism revenue as snow melts faster at ski resorts. But as directors of facilities across the country […]

Describing how Jeff Tilly went from production management to facilities management isn’t exactly a “stop the presses” story. The story does begin in a pressroom, however—specifically, at the Rockford Register Star, which covers the Chicago suburb of Rockford, Illinois, and surrounding area. When joining the paper in in 1994 following his honorable discharge from the […]

High diving is not for the faint of heart. But for many professional divers, the thrill of flipping and flying from a great height into a pool is unmatched. In world championship competitions, men dive from 27 meters, which is roughly equal to eight stories. Until last year, the only place to practice this feat […]

When the new Wells Fargo corporate campus is completed in mid-2025, its twin 10-story buildings will loom large over the Las Colinas community in Irving, Texas, just outside Dallas. Their tinted exterior windows will literally reflect the growing community surrounding them, while helping heat and cool the 6,000 employees working there. The employees will also […]

So how does one enter that most exclusive of Midtown Manhattan neighborhoods, the so-called Billionaires Row along the southern edge of Central Park? Easily enough, at least at 520 Park Ave., one of the newer skyscrapers and completed in 2018. The doors are open to everyone to view as they stroll by, even if they […]

The hospital might be of fairly recent build, but diagnostic equipment doesn’t last forever. So Jenn De iuliis explains while overseeing the replacement and upgrade of one of the most sensitive and expensive facilities at Woodstock Hospital in Southwestern Ontario. “It’s all about how you and your team take the hospital’s mission to heart and […]

Foresight and serendipity add up to a winning formula. So it would seem in suburban St. Louis where a Pfizer pharmaceutical plant is being expanded by 40,000 square feet just four years after its completion. That facility in Chesterfield, Missouri, proved its worth while manufacturing and testing the quality of a COVID-19 vaccine with its […]

Normalcy is scarce in hospitals, and being confined to a bed or hospital wing can wear on the strongest of patients. It can be especially trying for children, something that Kristian Watkins has noticed since the pediatric Diamond Tower at Banner Health’s University Medical Center in Tucson, Arizona, was built in 2009. In 2021, Watkins, […]