Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Marine Research Building

The Marine Research Building is one of three research buildings designed by Ellenzweig under a master plan for the Institution’s Quissett Campus prepared by Ellenzweig and Stephen Stimson Associates, landscape architects.

The building includes both general and specialized biology research and development space related to marine activities, including flexible wet labs, a scanner facility, necropsy facility, clean room and mass spectrometer labs, spaces for instrument development and fabrication, marine acoustics research, and a marine research archive. The building houses eight Principal Investigators and 45 research staff. The second floor includes continuous suites of lab and office spaces with nodes for interaction along the way. The separate office areas encourage researcher interaction while still providing direct access to lab spaces. The first floor contains specialized research space and a service yard for access to the staging, necropsy, and scanning functions.

The building massing stretches between two hillsides on campus, affording entries at both the Lower and Upper Campus levels and linking two previously disconnected campus areas. The exterior is clad in white-cedar siding, curtainwall with sunshades, and zinc cladding at the penthouse. The wood siding is a nod to Cape Cod’s most prevalent building material, and is intended to weather to a soft gray to match adjacent buildings on campus. The building design has been guided by green building principles, including preservation of open space, use of heat recovery, use of both wet and dry scrubbers for exhaust systems, sunshades for solar control, use of renewable resources, and many other features.

As Architect for the project, Ellenzweig provided master planning, programming, architectural design, laboratory planning and design, and construction administration services.