The Feigin Research Center is Texas Children’s hub for pediatric research. The 20-story building allows researchers to intensify their research in areas of fundamental importance in microbiology, immunology, cell biology and sciences of infection and inflammation. Here, researchers are making landmark discoveries and fundamental contributions to the fields of medicine, such as learning how to genetically manipulate tumor cells to make effective cancer vaccines and enhancing patients’ own immune cells to enable them to attack cancers directly.

Over the years, we have partnered with Texas Children’s Hospital on two phased projects designed to optimize this existing building. Phase 1 involved transforming the previously 12-story mixed-use building into a dedicated research center consisting of research labs, support spaces, a vivarium and a conference center. Phase 2 added eight floors to the existing building and 200,000 SF housing research labs, clinical research offices, good manufacturing practice (GMP) space for gene therapies, a simulation center, an expanded vivarium, and a new animal imaging center. Throughout the building, the labs are designed on a generic footprint to offer maximum flexibility; assignments can fluctuate in the large, open labs without movement of walls. The design also incorporates a flexible casework system to give users the capability of reconfiguration as technology or staff changes.

To create a beacon effect and allow the building to “change expression” throughout the day, the vertical expansion is clad in high-performance radiant glass with ceramic frit glare control that is transparent in direct sun, reflective when skies are cloudy, and emits a welcoming glow at night. The vertical expansion went onto receive an “Honorable Mention” in R&D Magazine’s Lab of the Year program.