The South Texas Research Facility is a more than 1,000-foot-long bar building that bends with Floyd Curl Drive. Its horizontal arrangement creates one large floor for the contiguous arrangement of six different medical research programs, which encourages informal encounters that spark new ideas and directions for research, fostering a sense of community and interactivity that would be more difficult to achieve in a high-rise structure. The laboratory floor is lifted one story above the ground by a grid of cast-in-place concrete columns. Passing over the two main campus driveways, the building is both a boundary and a gateway: it marks the campus perimeter and defines a streetwall along the road, but it is also permeable and functions as the main entrance to the Greehey campus.
From four small lobbies at ground level, elevators provide access to the second-floor laboratory level, where clusters of faculty offices alternate in the building plan with five lab clusters. A corridor passes through the center of the building to connect them all, with support spaces on either side of the corridor, and with the open-plan labs aligned along the building perimeter to take advantage of natural lighting. The third floor features additional faculty and staff offices and conference rooms.
The labs are outfitted for maximum flexibility with modular casework custom-designed by Rafael Viñoly Architects. Featuring adjustable-height work surfaces and vertical poles that connect to gas and other utilities in the ceiling, the lab casework enables quick and easy reconfiguration as research needs change.