Created to serve as a popular commons area for the student residences in Revelle College, the restaurant was named 64 Degrees — after the average temperature in nearby La Jolla, Calif. (64 degrees); the founding year of Revelle College (1964); and the height of Roger Revelle (6 feet 4 inches). It took locally based Swinerton Builders, the general contractor, six months to complete the project.

The project included renovating approximately 27,000 square feet of the existing 33,500-square-foot, one-story building. The facility now seats 288 in the main dining area and 35 in the adjacent café or market. The exterior spaces were designed to accommodate seating of 190, with concrete seat walls providing additional seating. A variety of seating options are mixed among the food platforms, ranging from large six-person booths to counter seating to counter-height community tables to soft seating around the fireplaces.

The new restaurant was renovated from the original 1966 Revelle Dining Commons, which was the first dining facility on the UCSD campus and had not been renovated since the early 1980s, according to Eric Naslund, FAIA, principal at Studio E Architects. It was a traditional cafeteria in that there was a serving area, and students would grab trays and be served food cafeteria style. The seating area was totally separated from the actual experience of getting the food.

“Dining on university campuses nowadays is quite different than it was 50 years ago, maybe even 15 years ago,” Naslund said. “There is a big transition in how universities think about [dining], so we creating a new refreshed place to do what they do in a better way.”

To keep up with the times, the solution was to integrate these dining areas with the food service areas. There are now five different platforms, each with it’s own chef. “That’s the biggest shift in this project — integrating the display and act of cooking with the experience of dining,” Naslund said. “There is a larger cultural trend in paying attention to what you eat and watching it be prepared. There’s kind of a theater aspect involved. To be an active participant in it all is what this generation is looking for.”

To address the client’s desire to put the theater of cooking front and center, the design team created a large food station as a focal point within the former dining room, known as the Big Box, and relocated the main entry into this space. This is the first of four food stations within the facility, and it combines a deli, salad bar and wok station in addition to counter seating for guests to get close to the cooking action.

In addition to putting the food process on display, another component included the addition of an exhibition kitchen so that the school could host cooking classes, said Maxine Ward, associate at Studio E Architects. Audiovisual technology was integrated into this station to display cooking demonstrations on screens throughout the facility.

One of the challenges of the existing building was connecting spaces with different volumes into one dining environment, Ward said. The former Big Box had an abundance of light and 24-foot-tall ceilings, but it always felt empty, especially during off dining hours. The solution was to fill the large room with activity and with appropriately scaled design elements.

To create a sense of openness between the Big Box and other lower portions of the building, the design team removed dividing walls and added skylights to bring natural light into the depths of the building. The lower space features a ceiling plane that accents unique floating light fixtures and a focal point in the Demonstration Station.

Read more about this project in the May issue of School Construction News.

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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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ZGF Architects, with offices in Portland, Ore., served as the project architect, while McCarthy Building Companies Inc., which holds local offices, built the facility located on a 3.3-acre site within the UCSD Health Sciences campus. The facility accommodates new and expanded multi-departmental programs, including bioinformatics, genomic medicine, gastrointestinal medicine, childhood diseases, pathology, immunology, inflammation, psychiatry, cardiology, neurosciences, infectious diseases and glycobiology.

The seven-story research facility features five floors of wet bench laboratories, open lab space, lab support space, seven stories of administrative office space, interaction spaces and conference rooms.

“With this new building, UCSD wanted the ability to attract the best and brightest researchers from the region and around the globe to join in the university’s mission to solve the world’s most critical health problems,” said Bob Betz, senior vice president of McCarthy. “In keeping with UCSD’s overriding goal of minimizing impact on the environment, another main goal was to design and build a laboratory facility that would achieve LEED Platinum certification and possibly lay claim to being the most sustainably designed academic laboratory facility in the world.”

The project’s strong focus on interdisciplinary collaboration is showcased in the open lobby, an interaction space adorned with gray-tone granite tile and California chestnut hardwood flooring. The lobby design also includes an iconic cast-in-place, concrete staircase that climbs seven stories up and one story down from the main space. The stairway is encased with frosted glass panels with LED-lit handrails and balconies enclosed with rift-sawn white oak wood panels and guardrails.

Designed to achieve LEED Platinum certification, the building includes several outdoor spaces as well as natural elements. The project includes two large, outdoor seating areas located on the second and fourth floors. These spaces feature slotted, metal overhead trellises and reclaimed teak wood ceilings and overlook the Health Sciences campus.

“Small conference areas are located on the top floor overlooking the lobby, some with oak wood privacy panels to create more intimate meeting areas,” Betz added. “Self-performed by McCarthy, the exposed architectural concrete shear walls, columns and stairways use Type III cement to lend to their aesthetic appeal.”

A computer-controlled exterior solar shading system on the east, west and south facades reduces visual glare, cooling load and energy use, while the radius ceiling shape helps redirect sunlight to provide optimum daylighting, according to the McCarthy team. Other sustainable features include daylighting, radiant heating systems, operable windows, individual thermostats, displacement ventilation, LED lighting, a water reclamation system, low-VOC materials, and high-efficiency mechanical, electrical and plumbing systems. UCSD will study how capturing natural light in this unique manner lends itself to enhancing employee performance and workplace satisfaction, Betz said.

“The highly MEP-intensive floor was the most technically challenging aspect of this construction project,” Betz said. “Particular attention was given to the build-out of these mechanical, electrical and plumbing systems to ensure optimum energy efficiency. BIM was utilized extensively to help in the coordination of these spaces, along with Blue Beam for the electrical plan room. Additionally, McCarthy brought its subcontractors aboard during the initial design phases to help fashion a seamless, integrated building process.”

Another challenge on the project involved site logistics, as the building footprint was wedged between existing structures. To overcome this challenge, the McCarthy team paid close attention to ingress and egress routes and collaborated closely with the university’s officials to ensure maximum safety and minimum disruption to traffic flow in and around that portion of the campus.

Long lead times were also needed for certain materials, such as the terra cotta tile from Germany and the aluminum cladding systems from South Korea. These materials were ordered well in advance so as not to slow down construction progress at the site, Betz said.

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