A New "Face of Beauty" for an R&D Campus

The Procter & Gamble Mason Business Center is a consumer product innovation campus with R&D laboratories, consumer testing, offices and support services. It encompasses 1.6 million square feet of business leadership and development space situated on a 253-acre site and is the largest community of P&G R&D teams in the world. The new Beauty Innovation Center expands and enhances this R&D nexus by bringing together the Beauty research and business with the Oral and Personal Health innovation groups.  The multiple new and renovated buildings extend the campus with a fresh expression of design for the 2,800 Beauty team members, while creating a new image of P&G Beauty for both business partners and invited product performance panelists.

The integration of the highly technical Beauty Innovation Center into the larger Mason Business Center community forms the largest R&D complex within P&G and has been described by Fred Spittael, P&G’s Global Architect based in Belgium, as ‘open brain surgery on an active research building’ due to the challenges of both the construction of the new buildings and renovations, while fully supporting the on-going research in the surrounding R&D facilities in the Mason Business Center.  HDR teamed with our 25 year partner in support of P&G, PEDCO E&A Services on the broad array of renovations within the Mason Business Center for the Beauty program.

This project extends the current thinking in the P&G workplace of supporting connections between the lab and office through new workplace strategies for team communications, individual work zones, transitional collaboration areas, and flexible community zones. It also supports a broad array of bench level and scaled-up, direct manufacturing research and technology platforms to bring new products to market.

Key features include:

• Exterior materials of cast stone, glass curtain wall and metal panel unify the new with the existing aesthetic.
• A two-story glass atrium presents a welcoming entry for visitors and provides glimpses into the facility from the exterior.
• Laboratories include adaptable, process-based open areas for shared resources that support a series of flanking research benches. Long sightlines from within and outside the lab extend to the exterior, improving safety and allowing for natural light within the lab spaces.
• A consumer learning environment for both self and professional application for sensory and clinical product testing and evaluation — including prep labs, panel discussion and testing areas to evaluate the consumer experience at multiple levels for each product.
• Stability testing facilities supporting critical temperature, and physical material and packaging performance evaluation on product resiliency.
• A cGMP flexible scale-up process research facility optimizing and proving the latest manufacturing technologies in an environment that can safely support agile research on multiple material and process hazard classes.
• A courtyard providing seating considerations for both individuals and groups, allowing convenient access to the interior cafe and grab and go dining options.
• MEP design responding to a broad array of differing capability needs, addressing critical research flexibilities, material constraints, and with levels of energy efficiency and recovery.  The systems design were tightly integrated with the research programs, and the unique considerations in multi-product open R&D laboratory environments, flexibility, while still receiving LEED Silver certification from the USGBC.