I'm dying chat.
Credit: An anonymous labrat friend. Thank you.
this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2025
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Cup sinks in fume hoods used to be more common, but as a lab planner they are pretty rare requests nowadays. If I had to guess, it's probably to do with the move away from central acid-waste neutralization systems towards procedural controls dictating neutralization/dilution prior to disposal.
Wait, industry is moving away from central neutralization? My wife is the facilities manager for an R1 engineering department and they commissioned a building two years ago with a central acid collection tank -_-
It varies from place to place, but the trend is away from them. I recently did a basis-of-design study for another R1 institution, and they said in no uncertain terms that they wanted to decommission the existing central system in their circa-1990 lab tower. Facilities departments often find them to be a PITA to manage and maintain, versus just requiring researchers to neutralize their acid waste before putting it down the sink, or collecting other hazardous waste to be taken away by a service
A lab planner! That's one of those cool (sounding at least) jobs that are obvious when you think about it but I've just never thought about it.
Definitely piqued my curiosity though. How much of your work is designing new labs vs retrofitting existing ones, how much travel is involved / how much area do you cover (the question there is really about how many labs exist needing such services), and what are any weird or surprising elements of your job?!
It's a niche specialization within architecture, and while I enjoy it it's not quite as cool as it sounds. Labs tend to be designed to a common template around the standard lab bench depth (30") and accepted safe aisle width between 66" and 72". Most of the fun is in equipment planning, and that's only exciting for a certain sort of Excel jockey 😅
Lab planning is a small enough niche that you really only find us in firms with a national or international reach, and so I'm more often working on projects several states away from me than anything in my own backyard. Travel varies, but other than initial meetings it tends to be hands-off job, so much so that I'm actually a 100% remote worker apart from when I'm on-site for a project kickoff or a site survey.
As for unusual or surprising parts of the job, I have really enjoyed working with some of the PI's I've fitted labs out for. The best has to be a chemist operating a biofuels testing lab, who regaled us with tales of all the times he'd blown up some glassware or singed off his eyebrows in the lab! I was a bit worried for his safety practices, though...
Ah interesting, I think for some reason I assumed it'd be more of an administrative career path offshoot for someone working in chemistry, but architecture does make more sense. And I know how you feel, I started my career in industrial controls because the idea of working at the interface between invisible electrical black magic and moving valves, motors, and other machinery seemed real cool.
Quickly learned that in that world, creativity and innovation are treated more like liabilities than anything else lol, and rightly so. There's a few great, proven ways to do most things, and rarely is it wise or fruitful to develop novel approaches over one of the proven solutions. I wouldn't want to be a chemist in a lab toting multiple new designs, lol.
I found it stifling, but could've tolerated it a lot better if the majority were WFH like yours!