South Georgia Gets New Public Health Lab

published Nov 11, 2007
South Georgia Gets New Public Health Lab
Public health laboratorians in south Georgia have moved into a new facility that serves the area with modern testing equipment and provides surge capacity for the State's larger Georgia Public Health Laboratory in metro Atlanta's city of Decatur.

The new Georgia Public Health Laboratory in Waycross was designed by Lord, Aeck & Sargent, the architecture firm that designed the award-winning Decatur facility.

That building was R&D Magazine's 1998 Laboratory of the Year and recipient of the American Institute of Architects Georgia 2001 Award for Architectural Excellence.

By intent, the Waycross building is a smaller "sister" lab to the Decatur facility.

"Though not as big, the Waycross and Decatur labs are very much alike in both physical appearance and internal design," said Karl Hoenes, the Georgia Public Health Laboratory project manager who worked closely with Lord, Aeck & Sargent and the project team during the planning, design and construction of both laboratory buildings.

"We planned this specifically so that if the Decatur facility were to become non-functional for any reason, we could easily move our people and equipment into comparable space and pick up our testing with minimal retraining time."

Some interior similarities between the two buildings include the disposition of offices to laboratory spaces, the configuration of laboratories, and the relationship of support spaces to laboratories.