The full release of the renderings follows an 18-month planning and design process that included engagement with internal University stakeholders, city officials, neighborhood associations and local community members.

As envisioned, the project will expand Brown’s slate of research facilities and serve as a catalyst for growth in Providence’s Jewelry District, a vibrant mixed-use neighborhood that Brown has played a key role in helping to revitalize. The building site is on Richmond Street across from Brown's Warren Alpert Medical School near Ship and Elbow streets. Mobilization of the site for enabling work began in Summer 2024, and pending progress in fundraising and full construction authorization by Brown’s governing board, the University is targeting a 2027 completion date for the building. Suffolk Construction will serve as lead contractor.

Flexible design for evolving science

Danoff Laboratories will be a visible anchor in the Jewelry District, and the architecture team worked carefully on the design of the building’s exterior to ensure its successful integration in the neighborhood, said Noah Biklen, a Brown Class of 1997 graduate and senior principal of TenBerke who is leading the project design team. In a nod to the façades of nearby factory buildings, the base of the facility will be made from regionally sourced masonry and stone, he said. The seven stories will be stacked in a calibrated grid design of metal and glass, inspired by the tactility, depth and tones of the nearby industrial buildings.

In a rejection of the traditional aesthetic of a fortress-like science lab, Brown’s architects said the facility will offer a welcoming public presence. “We started from the idea that science is a collective endeavor, and therefore a social one,” Biklen said.

At ground level, it will be surrounded by open space and a bright, south-facing publicly accessible patio, and an area designated for a café with seating. Passersby will be able to peer inside to the lobby, a flexible auditorium and an education lab that can be used for teaching and public programs, including science demonstrations with local students. The first floor will also house spaces for interactions with participants in clinical trials for new medical treatments or other patient-based research — a distinctive element uncommon to most lab buildings, but reflective of Brown’s focus on developing solutions to real-world patient challenges. Corridors will offer ample gallery-like space for display of scientific research or artwork, and landscaping has been designed with community connections in mind, with paths through and around the building.

“We're introducing new ideas of transparency and connection in terms of how a research building engages the street, where there’s a real sense of permeability to the shared public realm,” Biklen said. “We're very excited about how, architecturally, we've been able to create an attractive, sustainable research environment for scientists that will also serve visitors and the broader community for years to come.”

The Danoff Laboratories building is designed to enable groundbreaking discoveries now and serve as a research environment flexible enough to accommodate the way science will be practiced in the future. Five of the building’s seven floors will be fully dedicated to research, with wet labs situated inside glass enclosures to amplify natural light and enhance connectedness. At adjacent dry work spaces, researchers will be able to perform work such as advanced computational analyses, an increasingly significant aspect of scientific research. Movable equipment will accommodate evolving technology, methodologies and approaches.

“These will be extremely flexible laboratories that are able to morph over time as science evolves,” said Terry Steelman, senior principal at Ballinger and one of the architectural leads on the project.

The wet labs will be located by the windows, while spaces that require complete enclosure for tissue culture or microscopy are embedded in the middle of the building, with minimal exposure to sun.

Comfortable meeting spaces that invite researchers, faculty and students to convene and collaborate will be situated at the corner of each floor of the L-shaped building, with dining areas and seating that can be arranged for symposiums or impromptu gatherings, Steelman said. Small rooms will also be available for formal meetings.

“As opposed to having one researcher in one area working on their own project and another tucked away working on something else, the type of space we’re envisioning will maximize the potential for interdisciplinary work and the cross-fertilization of ideas,” Steelman said.

Danoff Laboratories will have capacity to provide lab space for 75 principal investigators, with a total of roughly 700 life sciences researchers expected to move into the facility in phases. In addition to faculty, researchers will include students from every academic level along with postdoctoral scholars and Brown research staff.

Four major research programs — cancer, brain science, immunity/ infectious disease and aging — and cross-cutting areas such as biomedical engineering, artificial intelligence and RNA technology will be embedded throughout the research floors. A physical bridge will connect the building to Brown’s Laboratories for Molecular Medicine at 70 Ship St., which will support research and collaboration continuity. Three of the major research groups (cancer, brain science and immunology) will include faculty and students in both buildings.

“Engineers will join biomedical scientists to drive innovation, entrepreneurship and strategic partnerships, allowing for the translation of discovery to real-world impact in human health,” said Tejal Desai, dean of Brown’s School of Engineering and an accomplished biomedical engineer.

Diane Lipscombe, a professor of neuroscience who directs Brown’s Carney Institute for Brain Science, said Danoff Laboratories will enable the University to combine research in areas such as neuroscience, pathology, genetics, biomedical engineering and computational brain science, increasing the potential for discoveries.

“Brown researchers continue to deepen scientific understanding of how the brain works and expand knowledge about diseases like ALS, autism, Alzheimer’s disease, neurodevelopmental disorders, epilepsy, addiction and depression, and this new state-of-the-art research facility will accelerate our work toward new therapeutics, interventions and diagnostic tools,” Lipscombe said.

Because of its proximity to other life science spaces, the new facility will help to co-locate a critical mass of leaders across the biomedical sciences, engineering and medicine to address significant problems in human health, said Dr. Mukesh Jain, dean of medicine and biological sciences at Brown. The facility will be located near Brown’s medical school, its labs at 225 Dyer St., research buildings for its affiliated health systems, and the under-construction Ancora L&G building that will host the Rhode Island State Health Laboratories and other Brown labs.

“Brown has a long tradition of pioneering scientific collaborations that affect patient outcomes,” Jain said. “This facility is the centerpiece of a comprehensive vision developed with great intentionality to advance discovery and to leverage partnerships with local health systems, the private sector and the state to achieve impact.”

A leader in sustainable design

In addition to enabling leading-edge science, Danoff Laboratories will support environmental sustainability goals of the University, city and state, said Stephen Porder, Brown’s associate provost for sustainability. It will become Brown’s first laboratory building powered by 100% renewable electricity (with emergency backup for resiliency) and one of the first all-electric laboratory buildings in the region.

The facility’s impact will eventually extend far beyond its walls, Porder noted, with its equipment decarbonizing other Brown buildings in downtown Providence. By establishing hydraulic connections between the new building and older, neighboring structures, its hyper-efficient electric heating and cooling system will enable substantial reductions in heating and air conditioning usage in the connected buildings, accelerating their paths to a zero-emissions future.

“From a sustainability standpoint, large laboratories are a challenge because they use a very high amount of energy and require constant air circulation,” Porder said. “By confronting this at the earliest stages of this project and bringing innovative planning and design to bear on the problem, we are converting this into a massive opportunity to create a more modern and sustainable facility, without sacrificing scale or ambition.”