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July 2016 Portraits
Sherwood Butler
CEO, Tria
Age: 54
Industry experience: 29 years
After graduating from Wentworth institute of Technology, Sherwood Butler joined a tiny architecture firm in Cambridge and immediately began designing life science projects for a local research institute. Butler’s on-the-job training prepared him for the rising demand for lab design in the past two decades, a specialty he continued in roles after selling the firm to Perkins + Will in 2012. In 2015, Butler founded Boston-based TRIA, which has grown to a staff of approximately 25 employees and recently added Haril Pandya, a former CBT Architects principal, as a senior principal to expand its business lines beyond its traditional life science specialty.
Q: As an ever-growing number of developers and architects focused on life science projects in recent years, what are some of the pitfalls that inexperienced firms could run across?
A: It’s fairly easy to go online or to some educational conference to understand the current trends in lab design, whether it’s floor-to-floor heights or column spacing or certain types of layouts. One of the biggest pitfalls is not having a clear view on where science is going. That’s one thing that TRIA has always been important to us. We’ve always had scientists on staff, chemists on staff, so that we are working with our clients and understanding where their science and technology is going in the future. We are able to help developers design core-and-shell lab buildings that are not going to have the right floor-to-floor height and column spacing, but the right core, understanding what ratio of office to lab to service areas, and whether or not we think there are going to be folks working in the labs, or whether it’s going to be more automated and robotics in the future.
Q: Will that trend toward automation affect the cost of lab buildings?
A: I would love for the price of lab buildings to come down, but I don’t think it’s going to happen. Over the past 20 years, it seems like labs were moving much more toward automation, and a lot of that was driven by genetic sequencing. As the human genome was mapped and a number of other technologies have advanced, these labs still need scientists to run them. I think we are back currently to the trend of using automation and robotics and AI to do the maximum amount possible, but we’ve ultimately learned in 2024 we still need people in these labs.
Q: How do adaptive reuse projects compete in today’s lab market?
A: In 2020 when the pandemic hit, a lot of the other market sectors took a big hit. I’ve had conversations with the top developers across the country to help them reposition mostly office assets to either R&D, lab or GMP. In the past five years, we’ve probably repositioned 12 to 15 large-scale developments to life science. However recently with the market correction, we’ve been seeing a little bit more happen with office to residential as well as office to hotel.
Q: Do lab buildings translate to other uses such as clean energy and tough tech, and is there interest among developers in those types of conversions?
A: We’ve worked on a couple of core-and-shell buildings with larger floor plates in recent years. We are currently working on two large battery manufacturing products going into purpose-built lab buildings. The infrastructure, the loading, everything about the lab buildings suits it perfectly to be used for these other sectors.
Q: What areas is TRIA focusing on for growth?
A: We recently brought on a senior principal to the office [Haril Pandya] who has 25 years’ experience in residential, mixed-use and corporate interiors, hospitality and retail, so those are the current sectors we are looking at.
Q: How do you incorporate AI applications?
A: We compete with the Genslers and the Jacobs and the Perkins + Wills of the world, so we have to be where they are in the advancement of this stuff. We were one of the first architects using virtual reality and augmented reality to allow our clients to interact on design, especially in lab and tech environments. We are fortunate to work with some of the most brilliant people on the face of the Earth who have come out of Harvard and MIT, but believe it or not, a lot of them cannot read nor do they have the time to understand floor plans. So, years ago we started with AR and VR and it’s a process where we’ve won two [International Society for Pharmaceutical Engineering] facility of the year awards through working with our clients to make sure they understand what they are seeing in their offices and in their lab and manufacturing spaces.
We have another initiative in our office looking at the impact of AI on design assistance, BIM and predictive analytics. Clients will come to you and ask how many linear feet bench scientists get today in a typical biology lab, or how many air changes. I think it is going to help make another revolution in architecture, but we don’t want to ever remove the human element. That’s something that has made architecture something special. We could be on the verge of losing that if we’re not careful.
Butler’s Five Favorite Albums
- “Is This the Life We Really Want?” by Roger Waters
- “Purple Rain” by Prince
- “Unplugged” by Neil Young
- “Licensed to Ill” by The Beastie Boys
- “Among My Swan” by Mazzy Star
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