The Facilities Management Lab is the primary workspace Facility Management majors in their junior and senior years. Located adjacent to the 3rd and 4th year design studios, the Preservation Lab is used as a space for lectures, seminars, and workshops, but also as a learning library, and place for research and design. The lab can serve to address a number of design and post occupancy applications that demonstrate some of the work of Facility Managers in the current and future workplace. For example, students and faculty have the ability to access data about energy use in the Architecture Building within the lab so that it can be used to discuss the building’s occupation and use. The fall 2011 Facility Management courses focused on local building case studies as the basis for learning. This included visits to sites such as Children’s Hospital, to examine first hand the unique problems of Facility Management for an array of facility types. The Facility Management Lab served as a place of collaborative work between faculty, students, and built environment professionals to discuss the findings gained through on site observation and in depth analysis.

The lab also serves as a place for full scale testing of interiors. The current course, Project Planning and Programming, is focused on post occupancy evaluation of the new Architecture Building. The lab’s role in this will be to serve as a place for collaborative work, but also as a place to test the design of interiors, including surfaces and finishes, lighting and acoustic properties. As part of their coursework students will analyze sound absorption and spatial quality, thus addressing the analytical and aesthetic properties together in design.