Programming and grouping spaces
Chad Poppe was feeling growing pains. His startup, Bion Companies, had been renting space in a typical office building. But Bion’s focus on laboratory science and biofuels components makes the group anything but a typical client. “We’d gone down the path with a developer and had floor plans to fit out another office suite in a spec building,” said Poppe, a co-founding partner.
“We were working really hard to fit in this space, and the building should work for us instead. We started thinking about a new space, but we didn’t know how many square feet we needed, what should be arranged where or how to get plans drawn up for what we wanted. It was really a learning curve.”
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That’s saying a lot, considering the advanced science Bion Companies carries out each day. “With eight employees, we’d probably say everything needs to be close to everything else all the time,” Poppe said.
Architect Kann and Business-Development Specialist Mike Jamison visited Bion’s current office with a low-tech—but highly effective—exercise: Paper cutouts sized to represent the square footage required for each type of functional and support area. The tool helped Bion’s team visualize which spaces to group together and how to control access to the more sensitive rooms and equipment.
