Midmorning sunlight pours into the floor-to-ceiling glass space at an angle, glinting off the sleek, stainless steel sign that beckons visitors forward. A steel beam slants upward from a concrete bench, topped off with a light-colored epoxied wooden slab, its darker whorls exposing the character within. Sitting on the bench gives a visitor an angled view into the Maker Space just beyond where sunlight — streaming in through a mammoth, full-view glass garage door — illuminates the large butcher block workstations, and perhaps the next big idea.
Beauty, form, and function: The Advanced Engineering Building has taken its place as 51ԹϺ’s newest addition.
Connected via a skywalk to the Thomas T. Beam Engineering Complex, AEB is neighbors with the Science and Engineering Building, and just a stone’s throw away from the Chemistry Building, with health sciences, physics, and life sciences further down the mall.
“Novel engineering design and prototypes, innovation of new technologies, and patents will come out of this building,” said Rama Venkat, dean of Howard R. Hughes College of Engineering. “That is one of the things we are confident of. The AEB will truly be a place where real-world problems seek and find next-generation solutions. I’m delighted that our dream of this building is a reality now.”
AEB’s footprint along the “east-west innovation corridor” — a term coined by project architects for that section of campus — wasn’t guaranteed for some time. Venkat, who developed the vision for the building more than a decade ago, was offered a few possible spots on campus. He advocated for the parcel of land right next to the TBE and SEB complexes.
“Now all three of them are connected physically,” Venkat said. “They are in the same vicinity. It facilitates easy interdisciplinary research collaborations, which is what the AEB is ultimately all about.”
Maker Space
Collaboration begins as you enter the first floor of the building. There are multiple entrances, but all pathways seem to lead to the Maker Space — the heartbeat of AEB.
“This is where students will create the future,” says Richard Jennings, AEB Maker Space coordinator.
The idea is for students to learn theory and fundamentals in the neighboring flexible classroom, which features movable tables and chairs to encourage teamwork, and then immediately apply what they’ve learned to hands-on creation and experimentation.
Over the next few months, state-of-the-art technology will be moved into the three equipment rooms — also illuminated by floor-to-ceiling windows — on the southeast corner of the building. Advanced 3D printers capable of mimicking various tissues throughout the body will help students pursuing interdisciplinary studies in biomedical engineering. The venue also will feature a high-precision desktop C&C mill, high-spec knee mill and lathe, laser cutters, oscilloscopes, wave-form generators, soldering stations, along with an assortment of hand tools.
The workstations — topped with durable, non-conductive butcher block surfaces — command the center of the room and will support computers and laptops. Yellow electrical outlets, descending from industrial extension cord reels bolted overhead, lead visitors to look up at the exposed duct-work ceiling.
A bank of lockers line one wall for students to store their projects; in year’s past, they often had to drag their projects back and forth from home or cars to campus, leading to mishaps. The polished concrete flooring that runs through the entire space gives it a feeling of a high-tech garage, one that could lay the groundwork for the next big innovation.
If a project created in the lab really shines, faculty and staff may select the it for public display in the neighboring showcase space while an 8’foot-by-15-foot digital display augments the findings.
Flexatorium and First-Floor Study
Beyond the Maker Space’s main entrance, the central first floor corridor leads to a spacious, well-lit room with comfortable seating for studying, gathering, and meeting. The AEB's main entryway seamlessly connects visitors to this space and has been gradually gaining attention from students as the spring 2024 semester progresses.
Classes in AEB will officially commence this fall, and one of the key spaces to support the ever-expanding engineering student body is the flexatorium.
A lecture hall by day, an event space by night, the one-of-a-kind flexible auditorium boasts theater-style seating that can be customized for a variety of purposes, as well as state-of-the-art technology to support active and engaged classroom learning.
When Venkat first envisioned AEB, the college was gaining steam with enrollment. Over the last 14 years, graduate and undergraduate enrollment has doubled to 3,600 and is expected to reach 4,500 by 2030. AEB will be able to support that explosive growth, he said.
As its name suggests, flexibility is at the heart of the space, but it’s representative of Venkat’s larger vision for AEB. From top to bottom, AEB features flexible, adaptable, modular spaces that inspire innovation, collaboration, and creativity.
Breanna Geller, Ph.D. student in computer science, has already settled into her second floor office. She’s looking forward to holding her office hours in the flexatorium, where students from 51ԹϺ Engineering’s new autonomous racing course can use the adaptable space for testing algorithms to enhance the performance of tiny self-driving cars, making them faster and more adept at navigating obstacles.
“It’s such a pretty and functional space, and I can’t wait to start using it,” Geller said.
Drone Aviary
There are two main vestibules on each side of the flexatorium, but a third portal — a large glass and stainless steel garage door — can be opened for events, or to move oversized projects in and out. Hang a left out of the garage door, and you’re outside on a large patio that leads to a maze-like garden filled with trees, cacti, vegetation, and blended in cement-block seating.
Next to the garden is an imposing, yet, not-quite-sure-what-to-make-of-it structure: a looming, open-air box constructed out of thin, steel columns and covered with a barely noticeable black net. Its purpose is made clear when a team of 51ԹϺ engineering graduate students wheel out a cart of drones of varying sizes, enter the box, and place the drones at predetermined “launch pads.”
On a slightly overcast afternoon, with only a slice of blue sky peeking through,Martin Arguelles Perez, an electrical engineering Ph.D. student, guides an octocopter drone into the air.
“We can fly just about anything in here,” Arguelles Perez said, adding that the cage enables him to have GPS access and provides a safe way to test out prototypes.
With the skills he’s gaining at 51ԹϺ Engineering, Arguelles Perez has dreams to oversee his own robotics department within a company or to launch a business of his own.
This is part two of Venkat’s dream: Seeing what 51ԹϺ Engineering students can become — and perhaps what companies they can form — with the Advanced Engineering Building as the newest tool in their pursuit of their educational, career and entrepreneurship goals.
Open Concept Wet and Dry Labs and Office Space
Head back inside and follow the main corridor to the elevator bank, your ticket to the second and third floors. Both floors are almost mirror images of each other in both design and functionality. Research faculty will be holding office hours in their new digs on one side of the floor with shared office space, tailored for graduate students like Geller, lying just outside.
“I think it’s great that we have a new building catered solely toward engineers and computer scientists,” Geller said. “I can easily reach out and find someone working on my left or my right and ask them to help solve a problem I’m working on.”
On the other side of the main hallway, open-concept laboratories — dry/computational lab on second floor and wet lab on third floor — take center stage. On a recent tour, Venkat boasted about the research in emerging securities technologies that will soon be underway in the 6,000 square feet of the dry lab. Long white tables on wheels, along with movable chairs, line the entirety of the room. Here, 51ԹϺ researchers will develop the newest innovations in circuit design, robotics, big data, and cybersecurity through the design and build of new ideas and technologies in software and hardware.
“The labs of today are no longer small and siloed,” he said, adding that each floor can support about 100 graduate students and their research activities. In 2023, 51ԹϺ Engineering faculty were awarded over $17 million in research grants — the highest ever in the college’s history.
“We build open labs to encourage collaboration,” Venkat said. “The best research and the best solutions result from interdisciplinary interactions from disparate fields coming from different perspectives of the same problem.”
Erica Marti, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering and construction, agreed. She’s moving her research team, which studies ways to remove harmful disinfection byproducts from drinking water, to the third floor wet labs.
“The best type of research is collaborative,” she said. “Having a shared space is ideal for planned interactions like research meetings and sharing equipment. More interestingly, a shared space leads to unplanned interactions and discussions that spark new and unexpected ideas for projects.”
In the wet labs, transformational technologies will provide the pathway for the next big innovations that change the way the world operates in water resources management, energy solutions, and biomedical applications.
Environmental chambers and fume hoods on the wet lab floor is a key differentiator from floor 2. But both spaces contain one feature that seems to be getting the most “oohs” and “ahs.”
On each floor, there’s a small conference room featuring a floor-to-ceiling glass window that gives users a direct view into the lab just beyond their reach. When students and faculty are meeting, they can either watch as researchers work, or, with the flip of a switch for privacy, transforming the window from clear to opaque.
“We wanted every space to have a purpose,” Venkat said. “By fall, each and every corner of the building will be bustling with activity. And, sooner or later, we might need another building."
