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In dreaming up their 36,000-square-foot Marine Research Center in Grand Isle, researchers and staff from the Department of Wildlife and Fisheries faced a problem familiar to anyone building a new space: an expensive wish list.

“We wanted a big ‘wet lab’ or ‘tank room’ in the building that would house aquaria of all sizes,” says Jim Hanifen, assistant administrator for the agency’s Marine Fisheries Division, which monitors fish populations in the Gulf of Mexico. “It would have allowed researchers to observe species on site.”

But such a room isn’t cheap. All those heavy fish tanks require additional pilings for support, and the space needed lots of strategically placed utilities and plumbing. Ultimately, the wet lab’s price tag sent the project over budget.

“That room kind of had to go,” Hanifen says, “but we still had to maintain that function.”

The tank room made it into the Marine Research Center’s final plans after the project’s architects, Crump Wilson of Baton Rouge, found a way to build it cheaper. They placed the wet lab under the building, already elevated more than 17 feet because of FEMA regulations.

“It was usable space for the purposes they needed,” Crump Wilson partner Bobby Boudreaux says. “Why not take advantage of it?”

The move saved the department around $1.5 million.

Hanifen says it was one of several instances in which the firm seemed to understand what researchers needed. “Because of their experience in doing labs, they were able to ask some very good questions,” he says.

Founded almost 30 years ago, Crump Wilson has recently become a regional force in designing laboratories and research facilities. The staff of 10 competes primarily with large firms in Atlanta, Houston and along both coasts.

The firm’s attention to detail and experience, partner Mike Wilson says, has helped it land projects like the Bunge-Ergon Ethanol Plant Control Laboratory in Vicksburg, Miss., and a string of unrelated ethanol gas stations. It’s also at work on redesigning the Nicholls State University chemistry building and has completed design on the state’s Office of Public Health Biomedical Laboratory in New Orleans.

This year, three additional full-time employees have joined firm and the team is in the midst of designing a new headquarters, to be built in coming months at St. Ferdinand Street and Myrtle Avenue.

Crump Wilson veered into its niche after Wilson discovered he had a taste for labs in the early 1980s. Then working for another firm, Wilson teamed up with the late Bobbie Crump on a lab project. He was enamored by the challenge of designing a space that needed to be efficient, attractive and highly functional.

“I was intrigued by the complexities of it,” he says. “I liked that, in the end, you flipped things on, and they worked.”

Wilson joined Crump’s firm in 1986, and gradually they took on more laboratory design work. “It seemed to be a section that few architects were practiced in,” he says.

The field still is not crowded. Only six firms in Louisiana classify themselves as offering laboratory design, according to The American Institute of Architects (AIA), and many of them design more health-care facilities or classrooms than research labs.

“It’s a different type of architecture,” says partner Dianna Peden Odom, a former chemistry major. “Just like you have different fields of medicine.”

“Laboratories demand an appreciation for process flow,” Boudreaux says. “Materials need to come into a lab. They’re mixed, tested, or something else is done to them, then they’re sent back out. It’s linear.”

The design of such facilities, say the partners, is complex and technical. It often includes wet and dry labs and always requires special utility systems. The facilities sometimes need clean rooms for researchers handling materials like anthrax. They must also meet vast local, state and federal codes and regulations.

“We always have safety in the back of our minds,” Odom says.

The design work is also complicated by the need to fit large, bulky science facilities into existing architecture. But Boudreaux says elements common to labs, like fume hoods and exhaust pipes, can be integrated into the design, rather than hidden from view.

“We can celebrate a lab being a lab in the architecture,” he says.

For example, the Marine Research Center’s fume hoods will be incorporated into two large rooftop cupolas. Half the cupola is dedicated to exhaust vents, while the other half incorporates windows overlooking the marina. In the plans for the Office of Public Health Biomedical Laboratory, attractive vertical towers on opposite ends of the building are actually large ventilation units.

As science and technology advance, so does lab design. “It’s changing faster today than ever before,” Wilson says. “Technicians have been replaced in many cases by automation and spaces have to be incredibly adaptable.”

Research facilities are also under pressure to incorporate sustainable building practices, he says.

“Labs are notorious energy hogs,” Wilson says. “You can’t recycle the air, and it takes a lot of energy to cool 95- degree air from outside.”

Crump Wilson has stepped up its use of green design, including strategic placement of windows, shading mechanisms, recycled building materials and water reclamation systems. At the Marine Research Center, plans call for “gray water” to be reclaimed and used for washing boats and irrigating plants.

Like many architecture firms post-Katrina, Crump Wilson has been working at capacity, but its three partners say they’re careful to choose projects consistent with its mission.

“We turn away more work now than we chase, and we stay within certain market sectors,” Wilson says. The firm avoids all residential and most commercial design work, but labs aren’t its only business. It also likes long-term clients who provide recurring work. For example, the firm has designed more than 200 projects for the United States Postal Service throughout 17 years. It has also designed numerous local fire stations.

“We have great clients,” Wilson says. “It’s because we spend time on the front end making sure we’re compatible. That’s real important to us.”