History of the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology

Spencer T. Olin Laboratory
1967 - present

Pictures

"One of the first tasks was to choose an architect. At the time, the custom was that an Arts School building had to be designed by a Cornell Professor of Architecture. Bill had other ideas; He frequently said he didnt want an architects building, by which he meant that he wasnt interested in a building that focused on winning design awards in an architecture journal, but rather wanted a building that provided the best working conditions and used space efficiently. After a national search, he came up with the architectural/engineering firm Wank, Adams & Slavin. John Adams was personally in charge of the architectural end of the project.

Bill Miller then took what at the time was an unprecedented step he hired O. R. English (Bud) to act as a permanent liaison for the duration of project between the department, the architects, and the University.

Bill Miller had read and studied the Dennis description of building Baker. When the faculty building committee first met he insisted that we develop an architectural program, i.e., a broad statement of design goals -- the details would follow. We spent many Saturday mornings on this program, which ultimately did go to the architects and served as the basis for their design. As the design went through successive iterations, the committee continued to meet each Saturday morning to consider whether the needs of the department were being met. One of the difficult questions was how much flexibility to incorporate into the design. Chamot and Rhodes had expressed in their history the complaint that Baker had been too specifically designed, that is to say, each square foot of space had a particular use in mind with little flexibility to revamp it when later research needs changed. One example was that of chemical engineering, which could not house its industrial equipment in Baker because the ceilings were too low. This contributed to the eventual splitting off of Chemical Engineering from Chemistry as a separate department in a new building that met their instrumental needs. On the other hand, flexibility implies inefficiency and that costs money and yields a smaller building. The committee and architects came up with a design that had nine stories and 64,000 sq. ft. of floor space. The layout on each of the top seven floors was identical with two professor assigned to a floor. Each of the floors had six four-man laboratories and four two-man laboratories. Each of the professor offices had two entrances from the hall and an attached secretary office that in an office-pinch could serve as a professors office. The intent of the design was that each professor would have a guarantee of one four-man lab, but that ownership of the remaining labs was flexible and could be redesignated as needs dictated.

In consultation with the faculty it was decided to put the offices at the ends of the building rather than lump them together in an office suite. In retrospect, I believe that was a mistake because it isolated the faculty. The original Baker building had only four floors and all of the offices had windows in the hall doors; every time you walked down the hall you would make visual contact with several other faculty. In the new building with its nine floors and office isolation that intimacy vanished. You could come and go all day and never see another faculty member.

The ground floor had a central stockroom and number of specialized laboratories. The basement contained special facilities like glass blowing and machine shops as well as space for large, heavy equipment like NMR machines and related offices.

During the construction of any large building problems are expected and ST Olin had three of them. The first was totally unexpected. The soil engineers had dug test holes around the site and declared the ground to be stable. Around the site 40 caisson shafts were drilled (25-40 ft in depth), flared out at the bottom, and then lined with steel re-bar. Concrete was poured into each of them, covered and allowed to cure. When the covers were removed, everyone was shocked to discover that in one of holes all of the tons of steel and concrete had simply disappeared. When they lowered Bud English down this long, empty shaft, he discovered that at the bottom there apparently had been a gigantic empty cave next to the shaft. After the concrete was poured and the hole covered, the earth wall separating the shift and the chamber apparently gave way under the thousands of pounds of pressure above it and all of the concrete flushed down the shaft into the chamber and swept the steel in with it. Since the chamber was now filled, the solution was to simply refill the shaft with more reinforced concrete and proceed with the construction. But where did this empty chamber come from? The conclusion was that there was an ancient underground river running south-west through the site and in the course of time it left this cave. It is interesting to note that even today the South-West corner of the adjacent Material Science Building continues to have a serious water problem that requires a continuously running sump pump to prevent flooding.

The second problem was more visible. At one point after the steel had been erected and the open spaces covered with tarpaulins to protect against the winter weather, the contractors fired up salamanders to keep the freshly poured concrete from freezing. At some point during the night, a violent wind storm came up and the one of the tarpaulins came loose and flapped into the open flame of a salamander. The resulting fire spread to the other tarpaulins and there was a sheet of flame flaring up the side of the structure. Fortunately, there was no serious damage and construction continued.

The last problem was not discovered until after the building was finished and occupied. During the planning stage the committee had spent considerable time worrying about floods since they had been so irksome in Baker. At first the idea was to install floor drains in each lab. That idea was discarded, however, when we consulted experienced contractors who told us that laboratory floor drains frequently did not work because (a) over time they got plugged with debris from custodians sweeping the floor and (b) the freshly poured floor concrete contracted when it dried to leave the metal floor drain cup the highest point in the floor. Instead, we opted to make the whole floor as level as possible and slightly higher than the corridor floors so that a flood would drain out into the hallway and down the stair wells and eventually into the basement if the flood went undetected long enough. Since the floor was pierced in several places where the radiator risers came up into the laboratory, metal tubes were installed that rose 3 above the floor level to keep any flood water from taking that path to the laboratory below. Unbeknownst to the committee and the builder, a well-meaning worker before the concrete was poured had gone around and pushed each of these tubes down so that the top was flush with the floor level apparently believing that they were pour markers. When the radiators were installed they covered up the situation and it was only realized what had happened when we had the first flood on the fourth floor and it drenched every laboratory in the stack beneath it. Once recognized, the problem was easily solved by retrofitting new risers.

The decision to use an outside architect and to go for efficiency rather than beauty led to an amusing incident. The dedication of the new wing was held at the four-story interface between old Baker and the new wing. When President Perkins rose to give his speech, a group of e students from the College of Architecture who had secretly gathered on the roof of the passageway unfurled a building-long banner that read MEDIOCRE and waved placards reading UGLY and VERY UGLY. The startled president stepped back to avoid being hit by weights at the bottom of the falling banner; although grazed he graciously laughed and responded: I question your judgment, but admire your logistics. It is not recorded what Bill Miller thought, but it is likely that he took secret pleasure in knowing that he had not wasted money on unproductive artistic features." (Wilcox, 2004)