Northwestern University is putting $64 million received this month as part of a donor’s gift toward a 19-story addition to its Streeterville lab building.
Kimberly K. Querrey, a trustee for the university, and the Louis Simpson Trust granted $121 million for multiple projects at Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine, Urbanize Chicago reported. More than half will go toward Phase 2 of Northwestern’s biomedical research center at 303 East Superior Street that’s named after the trustee and her late husband Simpson, a Warren Buffet’s stock picker who died in January.
The facility’s first phase, which was designed by Perkins & Will, opened in June 2019. The second will consist of mostly new lab space, which is set to occupy 15 floors. The addition will add 340 feet to the 258-foot, 12-story first phase, to make the property the largest academic biomedical research facility in the world, according to Northwestern.
The project will bolster Chicago’s supply of lab space as the city and developers such as Trammell Crow, Sterling Bay and Mark Goodman work on local ambitions to foster a bigger life sciences economy. Building more space dedicated to private sector companies scaled up from research initiatives sponsored in academic arenas such as Northwestern’s project is viewed by real estate players as key to the goal.
Properties such as Trammell Crow’s Fulton Labs have already snagged some tenants, including an 87,000-square-foot deal with Xeris this month, while Sterling Bay’s first Lincoln Yards building that’s outfitted for lab users and nearly completed is in the hunt for its first lease. Simultaneously, Goodman is in the midst of getting another 16-story lab building in Fulton Market off the ground.
The Northwestern project’s initial phase required the controversial demolition of Bertrand Goldberg’s Prentice Women’s hospital. After people tried and failed to have the building designated as a landmark, including architects Frank Gehry and Jeanne Gang who sent letters protesting the demolition, Northwestern still ultimately tore the building down in 2013. The initial 12-story research center opened on the site in 2019.
Across the street from the biomedical research center, Northwestern Medicine submitted a proposal earlier this week to convert the fifth and sixth floors of the Hyatt Centric Chicago Magnificent Mile hotel into medical offices and connect the space to the existing hospital next door via a skybridge. The proposed project would create about 41,000 square feet of medical offices to meet a growing demand for outpatient medical clinics downtown.
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— Victoria Pruitt