The life-sciences industry is a growing part of New York’s economy. It accounts for 1,000 companies and 20,000 jobs, and researchers there received $3 billion in funding from the National Institutes of Health last year. The city has invested heavily in the sector and changed zoning rules to unlock millions of square feet of real estate for labs. All this has paved the way to open a multitenant life-sciences facility, called West End Labs, situated inside a 1920’s edifice on the mostly residential Upper West Side that’s been adaptively reused and made state-of-the-art by Perkins&Will.
The firm has designed scientific research centers across the country for more than 40 years, including the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Washington and the National Bio and Agro- Defense Facility in Kansas. It’s also been involved in New York’s push to become a life-sciences hub; a decade ago, Perkins&Will contributed to a Manhattan nonprofit’s study about how to make the city more competitive in the industry. It connected with Elevate Research Properties, a life-sciences subsidiary of Taconic Partners, which acquired and developed a midtown building into the Hudson Research Center in 2016 and is currently developing Iron Horse Labs, a research facility on the Upper East Side. When Elevate Research Properties bought this eight-story, over 400,000-square-foot building 10 blocks north, it hired the studio to retrofit it for life-sciences companies. “We looked at an array of properties to determine their suitability as conversion candidates, and this site, with its proximity to transit, opportunities for private entrances and direct loading on multiple levels offering ‘building within a building’ tenant potential, and 55,000-square-foot, center-core floor plates, is unmatched,” Matthew Malone, senior vice president, life science, Taconic Partners/Elevate Research Properties, says. “A new exterior enclosure not only improves its thermal performance but also introduces abundant natural light into the work environments, which of course includes the labs.”