Random Walk
From left: Will Webster (BS ’49); Katharine Schlinger; Warren Schlinger (BS ’44, MS ’46, PhD ’49); Chemistry and Chemical Engineering Division Chair Jacqueline Barton, the Hanisch Memorial Professor and professor of chemistry; and President Chameau cut the ribbon.
Schlinger Lab Dedicated
Caltech’s third new building in as many issues of E&S opened its doors on a blustery March 9. Almost a decade in the planning, the Warren and Katharine Schlinger Laboratory for Chemistry and Chemical Engineering is Caltech’s first new facility specifically and exclusively designed around the research needs of chemists and chemical engineers since the construction of the adjacent Noyes Laboratory of Chemical Physics in 1967. At the dedication, Warren Schlinger noted that there had been some growth in the years since he arrived on campus as a freshman in 1941, when chemical engineering “had a department made up of two professors and a secretary”—Katharine Stewart, whom he married the year he got his master’s degree. (Schlinger contributed to the faculty’s growth by staying on as an instructor until 1953.)
Like the recently opened Cahill and Annenberg buildings, the Schlinger Lab is on track to earn a gold certification under the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Green Building Rating System. Besides using locally derived or recycled building materials, the Schlinger Lab uses 28 percent less energy and 30 percent less water than typical buildings designed for chemical research. Meeting the stringent energy savings required for a gold rating was particularly challenging, as the fume hoods gulp electricity 24/7.
Fume hoods, for the chemically declined, are the enclosed cabinets in which experiments are done. The front side of the hood is a shatterproof windowpane that can be raised for access or lowered until it is almost, but not quite, shut. Powerful fans up on the roof suck a steady draft of room air in under the sash and through the hood in order to keep noxious vapors away from the lab’s occupants. The higher the sash is raised, the more air whooshes through the hood and the harder the fans have to work.
Above each of the Schlinger’s hoods is an electric eye that constantly scans its vicinity. If nobody is around, the sash automatically lowers to the fully closed position, minimizing the volume of air being pulled in. (A second eye on the sash’s underside keeps a lookout for protruding glassware or other objects, stopping the descent if the beam is broken.) This high-tech hood design was pioneered in Europe but is new to the States.
Another European innovation new here can be found in Schlinger’s rotary evaporators, which are vacuum-assisted stills. Banks of rotovaps, as they are affectionately known, are essential to any synthetic-chemistry lab—whenever you dissolve something to make it react, you eventually have to get rid of the solvent in order to retrieve your product. A rotovap needs a strong vacuum to get the solvent out as fast as possible, which means either a centralized system with heavy-duty piping, or lots and lots of individual vacuum pumps—noisy, sewing-machine-sized beasts that like to leak their oil all over the lab floor. Instead, each of Schlinger’s rotovaps gets its suction from a pump the size of a large paperback book, efficiently and quietly powered by the campus’s compressed-air system.
Even while you’re standing at a fume hood, the outdoors beckons.
Energy-efficient double-glazed floor-to-ceiling windows flood the labs with natural light, a feat that was made possible by relocating all the plumbing and ducting—normally carried from floor to floor by a “wet” wall—to within a set of elliptical pillars out in the central hallway. By contrast, the entire west facade of Noyes Lab is windowless, hiding the giant utility core that serves the labs. Schlinger’s pillars, inlaid with green glass tiles, complement the rich maple accent panels and similarly hued flooring to give an effect reminiscent of the grand corridors of the Queen Mary.
Other eco-friendly features include a “bio-swale” on the north side that collects the runoff from the adjoining planters, sidewalks, and parking stalls, filtering it naturally before returning it to the groundwater. There’s also a dedicated room in the basement for collecting and sorting recyclables.
Weather permitting, you can even get in touch with nature without ever leaving the building. One entire wall of the first-floor classroom/conference room folds up into the ceiling like a set of glass garage doors, opening onto a courtyard.
As Division Chair Jacqueline Barton remarked at the dedication, “When you bring chemists and chemical engineers together in one laboratory, the results will be far greater than the sum of the parts.” Schlinger’s reconfigurable lab spaces will house the research groups of three chemists and three chemical engineers, working in fields ranging from drug design to pollution control. The Center for Catalysis and Chemical Synthesis will also move in, and there’s enough room remaining for two new hires.
The building’s architects, Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, are known for sustainable design and have done labs and other academic buildings across the nation. Rudolph and Sletten was the general contractor.
Besides the Schlingers, support for the building and its research was provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Will and Helen Webster, Victor and Elizabeth Atkins, the John Stauffer Charitable Trust, Barbara Dickinson, the Ralph M. Parsons Foundation, John Willard Jones (BS ’41), Patricia Beckman, and Gregory P. Stone (BS ’74, MS ’74). — DS
The Grand Promenade. To see more pictures, check out the slideshow at http://images.caltech.edu/slideshows/Schlinger-architecture/.
