UC San Diego announced in December it would soon begin developing designs for a new $111.6 million biology and chemistry building. Plans for the proposed 126,000-square-foot biology and chemistry building have been on the table for nearly a decade, but the project has been stalled due to lack of funding. However, campus officials are now pushing ahead with the project and hope to begin the design phase later this year.

The biology and chemistry programs are two of the university’s most highly ranked programs, and the university has already committed a portion of its own reserves to the project. Officials will now seek funding from donors and other outside sources. Provided the project remains on track, the six-story research and teaching facility will be completed by the fall of 2018.

UC San Diego will also complete a renovation of Mayer Hall’s Palacci Lab for the Physical Sciences Department. The project, designed by Harley Ellis Devereaux of San Diego, will demolish several existing spaces and transform them into four new labs capable of supporting physics and laser experiments. Though the project will not seek LEED certification, it will comply with the University of California Policy on Sustainable Practice and aims for an April 2015 completion.

Meanwhile, USD will complete improvements on the Manchester Hall Conference Center and will embark on the next phase of improvements to Loma Hall, home to the Shiley-Marcos School of Engineering.

Work on Manchester Hall will begin in June and will include a more than 8,000-square-foot interior renovation, improving both the career services and undergraduate admissions departments. The project will include mechanical and electrical upgrades, as well as a modification to the building’s entry colonnade with an all-glass curtain wall system.

Nearly 12,000 square feet in USD’s Loma Hall will also undergo upgrades, building on Phase I improvements, which were completed earlier this month. Those improvements included demolition of a large portion of the facility’s first floor to add a new lobby, ideation space and rapid prototyping lab. The next round of work will include the addition of a sound-isolation ceiling.

The San Diego office of Sunnyvale, Calif.-headquartered Level 10 Construction will provide general contracting services on projects for both universities, namely the improvements to USD’s Manchester Conference Center and Shiley-Marcos School of Engineering and UC San Diego’s Palacci Lab.

“The Level 10 project team has extensive experience in higher education projects,” said Mike Conroy, vice president of operations for Level 10 Construction, in a statement. “We have an adaptable approach that is focused on providing a high level of service to our clients while meeting their expectations for cost, schedule, quality and safety.”

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Designed by THA Architecture of Portland, Ore., and constructed by Rudolph and Sletten, headquartered in Redwood City, Calif., the MESOM Laboratory joins the David Keeling Apartments as the second LEED Platinum building on the UC San Diego campus.

The 19,000-square-foot MESOM Laboratory supports the university’s multidisciplinary research of marine ecosystem forecasting with formal and informal collaboration spaces. The building consolidated the research from separate buildings to a single facility in order to foster interdisciplinary interactions.

“We had a real need for multidisciplinary labs, especially for assembly and construction labs,” said Cammie Ingram, director, capital programs and space management at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego. “We had a lot of scientists doing build programs but didn’t have a lot of that type of space. Having assembly construction labs means we can go into the lab and load it right outside the door.”

The owner chose a site that allowed the facility to have twice as many assembly labs for a total of eight (four labs on two floors), Ingram said. She added that the site was an advantage but also made the project difficult because it was also constrained and relatively narrow. There was also the challenge of keeping the building’s profile as low as possible because La Jolla residents wanted to still be able to drive by and see the ocean requiring that the building minimize any blockage of the ocean.

“We were able to turn it into an advantage because we put all the mechanical equipment on the lowest level,” Ingram said. “It also basically became a design element because the exhaust stacks were placed on the back of building. They are clean and streamlined and look like rockets almost becoming a significant design element.”

Sustainable features of the building include natural ventilation and passive heating for all offices and workspaces; regionally sourced materials for the exposed concrete structure; exposed concrete structure to provide thermal mass; analyzed and reduced air flows in the laboratories; water-efficient landscaping focused on restoring native coastal plant species; use of FSC-certified wood at exterior siding and shade screens; and use of high solar reflectance index roofing materials.

“We have an excellent climate so we narrowed most of the need for intense energy use to the center core of the building,” Ingram said. “Two-thirds of the labs are able to have natural ventilation. Throughout the design process and construction process we did whatever we could to be as sustainable as possible.”

Ingram said that most of the funding for the $26 million project came from the National Institute of Standards and Technology. However, the school received funding from several sources, which is a major thing the team learned from this project.

“The bottom line for builders of an institution is to think about multi-funding sources,” she said. “Don’t think about getting it all from one source.”

The end product is a facility that is now one of a handful of LEED Platinum laboratories in the U.S.

“In less than a year, the MESOM laboratory has merited LEED Platinum status, a distinction that is extremely difficult for any facility to achieve and much more so for a working laboratory. This recognition underlines the high-quality design and planning — and commitment to the environment — that went into MESOM,” said Willie May, associate directory for Laboratory Programs, National Institute of Standards and Technology, in a statement. “NIST is very proud to have played a role in making this facility possible.”

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