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What’s next?
Imagine a place built for the future that fully honors the land and people of its past. Imagine a place designed to optimize collaboration and discovery in a way no structure has before. Imagine a place where experts and learners, teachers and students, researchers and assistants coexist and comingle as they help shape viable options that form the pathways to a global future where all of Earth’s inhabitant may thrive.
In April, 2022, Arizona State University will formally open the doors to a new physical space that will embody the entire philosophy behind the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory – a space dedicated to the enablement and empowerment of discovery, learning, solutions development, networking and engagement. Every level of this new structure features laboratories, classrooms, meeting space and recreation space that will equip and inspire the students, faculty, staff and guests of the Global Futures Laboratory to address and explore the critical issues related to the future of our planet.
This new home for Global Futures, on track for LEED Platinum certification, is located on a site that was home to the indigenous peoples of the Akimel O’Odham and the Piipaash. It was also a place that holds the water way that powered the Hayden Flour Mill, a spur line that linked the Tempe Creamery to the greater Union Pacific rail network and remnants of the U.S.’s first coastto-coast highway. Aspects of each of these historic elements, including the continued activation of a rebuilt indigenous canal, have been preserved as part of the new structure.
For the occupants, the structure provides 140,000 square feet of programmable space, with 70,000 square feet dedicated to laboratory use. It will yield a 26% reduction in global warming potential while retaining 100% of rainfall to recharge the aquifer and water landscaping. The exterior skin, created from glass-fiber-reinforced concrete, reduces thermal banking and has been custom crafted to optimize shade and passively cool the building from Arizona’s hot climate.
