Project profile: New Orleans BioInnovation Center

The NOBIC, a LEED Gold research facility, serves as an incubator for biotech startups, helping ideas conceived locally to become local jobs and industries. The facility includes a flexible 100 person conferencing center, breakout spaces, and a 2,000-sqaure-foot café. The design reinterprets vernacular regional climate responsive strategies—the slatted shutter, the landscaped courtyard water feature, the sheltered porch—to provide a facility that is both of its place and of its time. The facility captures rainwater and diffuses it to plants and soils on site, and is supplemented by the AC condensate (up to 20,000 gallons per week), which provides all landscape irrigation on site.
(2015 AIA/COTE Top Ten award recipient)