Fast Company Honors the Innovative Design of Promega’s Kornberg Center

Promega Corporation’s Kornberg Center was recently recognized in Fast Company’s 2021 Innovation by Design Awards. Designed by SmithGroup in collaboration with Ramlow/Stein Architecture + Interiors, the project received an honorable mention in the Spaces and Places category, which celebrates innovative buildings, structures and interior designs that solve problems in the built environment.

Now in its 10th year, Fast Company’s Innovation by Design Awards recognize the designers and businesses that are solving the problems of today and tomorrow. Winning projects must demonstrate key ingredients of innovation: functionality, originality, beauty, sustainability, user insight, cultural impact and business impact.

Named for the Nobel Prize-winning biochemist Arthur Kornberg, Promega’s new 280,000-square foot research and development facility opened in spring 2021. The Kornberg Center advances research capacity and capability in creating tools and technologies that support most novel methods and techniques in research, drug development, forensic science, clinical and molecular diagnostics and applied testing.

The Kornberg Center is the first lab building in the U.S. to employ a double-skin façade on all sides, delivering higher energy efficiency and increasing thermal comfort. This strategy, combined with several others—including radiant heating and cooling, operable windows that allow natural ventilation, total energy recovery, geo-exchange, rainwater collection and reuse, intensive green roof and on-site photovoltaics (PV)—reduces energy use by 65% relative to comparable facilities.

2021 is the fourth consecutive year that SmithGroup has been recognized in this competitive program—earning recognition for five additional projects since 2018.

To view a complete list of this year’s Innovation by Design Spaces and Places honorees, visit the Fast Company website.