If the pandemic has shown us anything, it is that the health of Black and Hispanic communities is being systemically underserved in large part due to an infrastructure gap that has left both urban and rural parts of the country bereft of key resources in a time of crisis.

In keeping with this pressing need, SOM unveiled plans this week for the new New York City Public Health Laboratory in Harlem that will replace an existing facility in Kips Bay owned by the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. 

The new $400 million laboratory will host a range of services addressing both clinical and environmental concerns in an adaptive scheme that can change focus to ascendent public health concerns as they come along.

SOM’s state-of-art structure, which last month was honored by the Public Design Commission’s Award for Excellence, rises from a three-story masonry podium into a prominent cubic volume containing first essential functions as well as community-facing accommodations, followed by administrative offices. A partial green roof separates the rest of the building from a five-floor laboratory tower whose extra massing has the added effect of providing passive solar shading for the 230,000-square-foot facility.

The project’s design team placed a particular emphasis on increasing public engagement with the laboratory, an element SOM’s senior designer Scott Habjan felt was crucial to the institution’s mission for community health. 

“The design of the new laboratory is the culmination and celebration of mission, culture, and place,” he said in a statement. “It moves beyond familiar institutional aesthetics to convey the duality between the building’s precise, rigorous laboratory environments and its dynamic Harlem context.”