Award-Winning Design

The building design for the Sustainable Engineering Laboratories (SEL) recently won the grand prize in the New Constructions category in the Embodied Carbon Reduction Challenge. This design challenge is a collaboration between the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center (MassCEC) and Built Environment Plus (BE+) aimed at promoting the reduction of carbon in building projects across the state. 

A panel of nine judges made their selections based on embodied carbon reduction, innovation, replicability, and cost effectiveness. The winning projects were honored at a reception during the Northeast Embodied Carbon Summit. 

Scheduled to open in Fall 2026, the SEL will be an ~75,000 square foot facility providing specialized research laboratories and learning spaces to empower interdisciplinary research at UMass Amherst, serve as a test bed for technologies that address real-world sustainability challenges, and prepare the next generation of engineers. 

According to the judges: “Sustainable Engineering Laboratories is a project that exhibits incredibly impressive reductions in embodied carbon, and, maybe even more importantly, sets an example through its design process that all practitioners in the AEC industry can learn from. The effort undertaken by the design team to ensure that embodied carbon was tracked and considered at every stage of the design process made SEL truly jump off the page.” 

In addition to promoting sustainable engineering innovation, the SEL will embody it; the SEL is designed to be one of the first carbon-neutral, LEED Platinum, geothermal laboratory buildings on campus. 

The building is designed by Boston-based architectural design firm Payette.