Cannon Receives Award for Oak Ridge

Cannon Design received First Place recognition in the American Society of Heating, Referigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) Region VI 2011 Technology Awards Program for its Multipurpose Laboratory Facility at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). Managed by the University of Tennessee-Battelle, this notable project is the largest facility for the Department of Energy (DOE), with 13,000 employees, and is home to leading research initiatives.

Design work for this project was led by the Cannon Design St. Louis team, consisting of Thomas S. Harvath, AIA, project principal; David Polzin, LEED® AP, design principal; Lynn S. Grossman, AIA, LEED® AP, project architect; Kyle Thiel, LEED® AP, project architect; Richard S. Bacino, RA, program manager; and Gerald G. Williams, PE, LEED® AP, lead engineer. ORNL Engineers Warren Thomas and Pete Wiegand along with ORNL Project Manager Gary Bloom and the ORNL project team were also instrumental in earning the award. McCarthy Construction, under the leadership of Larry VanHouten and Daniel Joseph, served as the construction manager on the project.

Cannon Design provided planning, architecture and engineering services for the new $56 million, 160,000-square-foot Multipurpose Laboratory Facility (MLF) to house the laboratory's chemical sciences, materials science and technology divisions. An integral part of ORNL's Modernization Initiative, the three-story MLF hosts research into chemical transformations at interfaces, synthesis science for materials by design, chemical and isotropic mass spectrometry, separation science, and laser spectroscopy.

To facilitate accommodation of future research initiatives, the laboratories are flexibly designed and arranged around a central service corridor. Researchers' offices are located at the building perimeter and adjacent to the labs, with visual connections between the two zones that introduce daylight and views into laboratory spaces. Infrastructure includes maximized chemical loading, vibration mitigation, and HEPA filtration for this state-of-the-art research environment.

The new building extended a pedestrian corridor along the campus's main axis, supporting the goals of the campus master plan. Based on the DOE's Guiding Principles of High Performance and Sustainable Buildings, and designed to achieve LEED® Gold certification, the new building features a photovoltaic array, light shelves, operable windows, and solar lighting.

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