Payette’s Ragon Building Redefines Biomedical Research Spaces

Research Led and Occupant Informed Design

Since Payette is a prominent forerunner in the design sectors of biomedicine and laboratory research—known for its integrated practice methodologies and technically performative, detail-oriented design across scales—it was approached to assist in the preliminary stages of the project’s program, tailoring it from a synthesis of extensive postoccupancy feedback archives and observations of Ragon’s researcher habits. 

Each office floor’s layout reflects a deliberate and expert interpretation: Based on Payette’s prior user surveys, growing institutional understandings of different effective working modalities, and inclusive perspectives on focus, the building occupants have options for group and individual work. 

Curated Spaces for Collaboration

Thoughtful spatial curation is also evident in the labs, which are the most active programmatic elements of the project. Within Ragon, three discrete but related activities occur at any given point in the day: writing, benchwork, and tissue culture work. Each activity has its own associated equipment, furniture, spatial parameters, and utility requirements. During their observation exercises, designers at Payette noticed that tissue culture lab work—typically relegated to insular, contained spaces—was surprisingly social and collaborative, despite its attention-focused nature. 

Recognizing the well-documented, biophilic benefits of daylight and external views on concentration and alertness, Payette proposed locating the Tissue Culture Labs along the building’s exterior wall. The facade’s triple-paned glazing and solar shades ensure this area is still fully climate-controlled, but they offer the benefit of direct access to view and daylight for user well-being in the space the lab team most commonly uses. 

That public-facing character extends from the landscape into the first floor of the building, with seminar rooms of varying sizes, reception area, and childcare facilities—in addition to loading and trial patient intake, which are adjacent but accessed by separate entrances. These auxiliary spaces support the institution’s staff (on-site childcare in particular makes a life-changing impact for scientist-parents grappling with the profession’s unpredictable extended hours in the lab), but they also host community functions and public events during off-hours. The daycare also maintains open spots for neighborhood families to enroll.  

Biophilic Design Principles to Foster Community

Even so, a strong sense of culture and community is a benefit inside an organization, as it is beyond the institutional walls. With both the executive conference room and canteen, the Ragon Institute’s leadership wanted to provide spaces for collective debriefing and to stimulate and support collegial exchange. These are further enhanced by access to outdoor terraces that bring in nature but also remind the institution’s faculty to reflect on their broader social connection to the neighborhood seen below and in the distance. 

“It’s become part of the commonplace rigor of doing architecture. I think Ragon is a particular example of the building functioning as a singular organism, inside and out. There’s this dynamic relationship between the skin and the floor plate—it’s telling a story that unfolds as you navigate the site: of the shape and social geometry of the building and the purposeful position it holds in the community regarding what it’s making,” adds Sullivan. 

Such instances, though seemingly mundane and intangible, reaffirm faith in the impact and importance of thoughtful design gestures at any scale.

Would you like to comment on this article? Send your thoughts to: [email protected]

• Healthcare

• Air Quality
• Biophilia
• Harvard
• Healthy Materials
• MIT
• payette
• Ragon