Lab

Hixson is a fully integrated architecture and engineering design service firm, and we’ve been in the science and technology business for 40 years. We specialize in complex environments, where there’s many times somewhat sophisticated environmental controls that are needed.

The most important thing is to understand what the client is trying to achieve. What are their main goals? What are they trying to either produce or improve? When we’re designing for labs and science and technology, we’re also designing for workplaces. We’re combining these two fields together to provide the best of both worlds.

Once we understand what the lab needs to do, the requirements for the lab itself, then we can start to optimize how that lab interacts with the rest of the support spaces in the facility.

We work with a lot of private industry, and the lab or the science and technology facility fits in within a larger business plan, so we need to understand how the lab facility supports their business case. That can be very unique for different companies, so if you don’t get that right, the full potential of the lab isn’t going to be realized.

Our engineers here at Hixson, we get brought on from the very beginning of the project to work closely in parallel, basically with the architects, the interiors, and the owner to help them determine what are the technical requirements, whether it’s temperatures, humidity, filtration, pressurization between spaces, even what some of the utilities are, and as the design proceeds, we make sure that those technical requirements are still met as we go through all the way down through commissioning.

At the end of the day, we’re a design service firm, so the service aspect of that is very important for us. We hope to establish long-term partnerships and relationships with our clients and ultimately become an extension of their staff.