Requirements Before Walls

How a Cannabis Testing Lab Gets Designed — and Why Your Architect Can't Start It

By Kate Evans, PhD, and Andrew Samann · Intrepid Scientific · 2026-09-01

Companion pieces: Compliant by Design (the manufacturing-facility version of this argument) · Built to Be Qualified.

0. Read-Me-First Summary

Somewhere right now, a new cannabis testing licensee is standing in an empty shell with an architect, and the architect is asking the only question architects can ask: "What do you need this building to do?"

Here is the uncomfortable truth about that moment: the answer is a document, and it gets written no matter what. Either the laboratory's scientific requirements are written down before the design starts — by people who know what an accreditation assessor walks first — or the architecture firm derives them during design, at architectural rates, learning the science as they go. The first path costs a fraction of the second. The second path has a third act: the corrections that surface during construction, paid for out of the build budget, at change-order prices, on the licensing clock.

This piece walks through what that requirements document settles for a cannabis testing laboratory — five decisions that get poured into concrete — and the sequence that keeps each one a drafting revision instead of a demolition line item.

1. The Document Gets Written Either Way

A testing laboratory is not an office with benches. It has airflows that must move in defined directions, rooms that must not share air, instruments that reject more heat than a small restaurant kitchen, power that trips ordinary circuits, and water whose grade is chosen once — inside the walls.

None of that appears on a lease or a shell drawing. It lives in a requirements brief — in regulated industries the formal name is a User Requirements Specification — that states, room by room, what the building must provide and why. The "why" matters: every requirement traces to something real — an accreditation clause, a state rule, an instrument's installation manual, a contamination pathway — so that when the builder pushes back on cost, the answer isn't "because we'd prefer it." It's "because the assessor will walk that corridor."

An architecture and engineering firm asked to produce this without laboratory input will produce it. They are good at buildings. They are not good at knowing that the water-activity balance needs vibration isolation, or that the assessor's first stop is wherever the grinding happens. The requirements come out generic, the price comes out high, and the accreditation-specific failures stay in the design until an assessor finds them in the building.

2. Five Decisions That Get Poured Into Concrete

Heat. A single ICP-MS rejects on the order of 16,000 BTU per hour and runs its own chiller. Add the LC and GC systems and a lab's cooling load resembles nothing an office HVAC package has ever met. Sized before ductwork is installed, this is a line on a mechanical schedule. Discovered afterward, it is a summer of instruments drifting out of calibration while the building fights its own air.

Dust. Cannabis sample preparation grinds plant material, and ground cannabis is cannabinoid-laden dust — a cross-contamination source that can shadow every potency result in the building. Where the grinding room sits, how its air is contained, and which direction the pressure gradient pushes are among the first things an ISO/IEC 17025 assessor evaluates, because contamination control is where data quality lives or dies.

Containment. Microbiology needs separated space and an aseptic workflow. One open room with benches cannot pass — not as an opinion, but as an assessment outcome. The micro suite's walls, door swings, and airflow are design-day decisions.

Power. High-draw instruments need dedicated circuits. A centrifuge sharing a bench circuit trips it mid-run — and takes the sequence on the neighboring instrument down with it. The panel schedule is a scientific document wearing an electrical disguise.

Water. Laboratory water grade and drainage neutralization are chosen while the walls are open. We know a pharmaceutical site that discovered, after commissioning, that its purified-water system carried microbial loading the specification never addressed. The consequence wasn't a memo. It was a facility constrained for years by a decision nobody wrote down — a mistake measured in millions.

Each of these is cheap exactly once: on paper, before the design exists.

3. "But Labs Don't Run URS Processes"

Correct — and that's the misunderstanding that costs the most. The requirements brief is not a laboratory operating document. Your finished lab will never open it again. It is a construction document with one reader — your architect — and one job: making the building able to pass assessment before the building exists.

The instrument vendors' site-prep guides don't substitute, either. They are genuinely good documents — per instrument. A site-prep guide has no opinion about where the grinding room sits relative to the balance room, whether microbiology is contained, or which way air flows between sample intake and prep. Those are building-level questions, and they are exactly the ones assessors ask.

4. The Sequence: Requirements → Design → Verify

Requirements. The brief is written first — footprint, rooms, separations, airflow, power, gas, water, monitoring — each item traceable to a rule, a method, or an instrument.
Design. The architect designs against the brief. Every design decision is checkable: does the drawing satisfy the stated requirement, yes or no? Disagreements get resolved in redlines, which are free, instead of change orders, which are not.
Verify. While the structure is open — framing up, walls unclosed — someone who knows the requirements walks the build against them. It is the cheapest inspection the project will ever have, and the last one where corrections don't involve demolition.

New construction is the best case for this sequence, not the exception to it: when nothing is fixed yet, every requirement is still a drawing decision.

5. When to Write It

Before the architect starts. That is the entire answer. If the architect has already started, then today — the second-cheapest day. The most expensive version of this document is the one reconstructed from a finished building by an assessor's findings list.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a URS for a testing laboratory? A room-by-room statement of what the laboratory building must provide — separations, airflow, utilities, environmental conditions — with each requirement traced to its source: an accreditation clause, a state regulation, or an instrument's installation requirements. Your architect designs from it; your assessor's expectations are built into it.

Can't our architect just figure it out? They will — during design, at their rates, without the accreditation lens. The requirements get derived either way; the choice is who derives them and how many of the misses reach construction.

Does this apply if we're renovating an existing space instead of building new? Even more so. Existing buildings hide constraints — undersized electrical service, inadequate makeup air, drainage in the wrong place — and the requirements brief is how you find them before the lease is signed or the demo starts.

Intrepid Scientific's principals include sitting ISO/IEC 17025 lead assessors and GMP facility specialists who have written these requirements for laboratories and manufacturing sites across North America and Europe. If you're standing in an empty shell wondering what it needs to become — that's exactly the conversation to have before the architect starts.