Jones Lang LaSalle Chosen by Howard Hughes Medical Institute as Facilities Manager for D.C.-Area Research Center

March 1, 2012
By Scott Baltic, Contributing Editor

Image courtesy Wikipedia user Matt Staley

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute has selected Jones Lang LaSalle to provide facilities management at its 689-acre Janelia Farm Research Campus in Loudoun County, Va., about eight miles north of Dulles International Airport. The campus’s more than 1 million square feet of space is punctuated by its central structure, a three-story building known as the Landscape Building, which is built into a hillside and features a 180,000-square-foot green roof, reportedly one of the largest in the United States. The campus overall supports more than 300 research and administrative personnel.

Within the center’s primary focus on neurobiology, research programs concentrate on such areas as cellular and developmental neuroanatomy, molecular biology, protein engineering, structural biology, synthetic chemistry and computational neuroscience.

Bill Barrett, executive managing director and leader of the life sciences business at Jones Lang LaSalle, told Commercial Property Executive that currently there are probably at least a dozen Nobel laureates working at Janelia Farm.

A place like Janelia Farm, Blake Layda, managing director of JLL’s solution development group, told CPE, is “a very demanding physical environment” in which to provide facilities management. The lab’s heavy investment in high-tech equipment is vibration-sensitive, imposes high electrical loads and demands critical heating and cooling capacities.

In addition, because they’re so accustomed to working in a collaborative environment, Layda said with a laugh, “Researchers want to question everything you do.”

Barrett commented that Janelia Farm is one of the first large non-profit clients for JLL’s life sciences business, which manages 70 million square feet of research, manufacturing and commercial space for corporate life sciences clients. That client list includes big-pharma powerhouses like Amgen, Pfizer, Novartis and Merck.

Interestingly, Barrett is a former research chemist and spent 28 years working for Pfizer, finishing up there as a vice president of global operations/R&D. He joined JLL in 2008 and helped found the company’s life sciences business. Both Barrett and Layda say one of the satisfactions of working with a client like HHMI is knowing that the dollars saved from increased facility efficiencies go right back into scientific research.

Designed by Uruguayan-American architect Rafael Viñoly and overlooking the Potomac, the wooded campus opened in 2006. Its more than 1 million square feet of space includes laboratories, offices, resident and visitor housing, a guest house, and conference facilities, as well as a Normandy Manor–style country house and an adjacent carriage house, both listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Headquartered in Chevy Chase, Md., the Howard Hughes Medical Institute is one of the world’s largest philanthropies, with an endowment of more than $16 billion and a research budget of about $825 million in fiscal 2011.