Where does laboratory space end and the office begin? It’s a question that architects and interior designers are trying to answer.

At One Charles Park in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the architecture firm SGA designed 400,000 square feet of interior space where the line between the lab and the office is blurred. Office staff have a direct view of experiments conducted on lab tables.

It hasn’t always been this way. Labs were once placed out of view, typically behind closed and locked doors, away from the sales and marketing staff. But at many of today’s life sciences companies, the two disciplines are intimately connected, said Caroline Bergin, an interior designer at SGA.

“Lab users were always in the basement with hardly any access to natural daylight,” Bergin told CoStar News. “Now life science companies want the scientists to have the best space in the building.”

SGA, Gensler, ZGF and other architecture firms are changing how offices for life sciences tenants are designed. New lab-office hybrid developments are in the works in Atlanta, Chicago and other markets, often at added cost to traditional set-ups.

“Lab and office function roles [are] shifting significantly from how the sciences have traditionally operated,” Gensler said in a Sept. 2022 report. “Knowledge sharing within the workplace is immediate and near constant.”

Interest has remained high even as the life sciences market has cooled from the days when investors flocked to the sector during the pandemic and researchers urgently worked on new vaccines. In San Diego, one of the largest life sciences markets, third-quarter leasing fell to its lowest level in a decade, according to CoStar data. Demand has declined sharply as inventory has soared.

Despite the slowdown, real estate development for biotechnology companies remains active in several markets as property owners bet that updated designs can help a project stand out at a time when potential tenants have more choices.

Trammell Crow, High Street Residential and Georgia Tech are developing a mixed-use campus in Atlanta called Science Square to include lab and office space along with apartments and retail.

The University of Chicago and CIC are developing a combination of lab and office space at the Hyde Park Labs building on Chicago’s South Side. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, invested $250 million in a new Chicago biotech hub.

Even in San Diego, new life sciences developments are underway. Sterling Bay and Harrison Street began construction this summer on the $265 million first phase of the Pacific Center campus.

In the new model of properties for life science, glass is the preferred material for walls instead of solid materials. Replacing drywall with glass walls not only creates transparency between a company’s research and business functions, the design helps “create opportunities for spontaneous collaboration, support advancements in the discovery pipeline and build a robust community of innovators,” SGA said in a description of One Charles Park on its website.

Omega Therapeutics, a developer of cancer treatments, is the largest tenant at the 107,000-square-foot One Charles Park, occupying the top five floors. The renovated building opened in July. Davis Cos. and Principal Real Estate Investors sold the two-building Charles Park complex in January 2022, before the One Charles Park renovation was completed, to Alexandria Real Estate Equities for $815 million.

For life sciences companies in their early stages, having an office where the lab work can be shown off is an important part of their strategy to bring in new funding, said Scott Barnholt, an architect at SGA.

“They’re looking to attract the best investors and they do that by bringing them in and showing them the lab,” Barnholt told CoStar News.

SGA recently won a contract in partnership with Dream Collaborative to design a life science building at the Innovation Square complex in Boston’s Seaport district for Vertex Pharmaceuticals. SGA also released in September its design for the Arsenal on the Charles life science project in the Boston suburb of Watertown.

Other architecture firms have taken a similar approach to blending of lab space with offices.

ZGF designed the Assembly in Pittsburgh, located in a renovated Ford Motor plant with offices set along the perimeter of floors and labs at the center, allowing “for easy access and transparency between work environments,” according to the firm’s description. Apple and the University of Pittsburgh are the tenants.

Gensler renovated a Princeton, New Jersey, office building dating to the early 1990s for Genmab, a Danish developer of cancer treatments. Labs are “strategically adjacent” to informal gathering areas where all employees can meet and talk.

SGA’s One Charles Park project involved the renovation of a 1994 building. Because labs have greater electric power needs, SGA designed two new internal shafts and a mechanical penthouse to support the greater ventilation and mechanical, electrical and plumbing infrastructure required, Bergin said.

The decision to put the labs in close contact with the office can be an expensive one, Barnholt said. To design an office building with laboratory space that’s immediately ready to occupy will typically increase development costs between 25% and 35%, he said.

That’s a cost that many executives at life sciences companies have decided is worth it, Bergin said.

“They want to have their whole company and business operations together in one place,” she said. “They want to create the collaboration and interconnection between the research side and the innovation said.”