ONLY A SMALL NUMBER OF individuals ever have the opportunity to participate in the planning and design of a new laboratory facility. And those who do rarely have complete control over the final configuration, which is always a compromise of needs and means. In fact, what usually shakes out is a hodgepodge of different individual's ideas. Architects, corporate financial planners, builders, and others in the decision line may have quite a different agenda than the chemist who plans to work there. There is another sense, though, in which nearly everyone who works in a laboratory for any length of time participates in lab design because laboratories change with changing needs and evolving technology.