With San Diego State University’s goal of becoming a top-50 public research university, they realized the importance of replacing the campus’s Industrial Technology building with a state-of-the-art Engineering and Interdisciplinary Sciences Building, which acts as a melting pot for collaborations between engineers, biologists, climatologists, and entrepreneurs.

Glumac’s MEP engineering experts provided bridging documents and peer review for the new 90,000 sf, five-story, design-build project, which includes 17 multidisciplinary laboratories; a nanofabrication suite; research spaces; instructional spaces; a clean room; the Lavin Entrepreneurship Center, which provides curricula to support students who aim to become entrepreneurs; the Zahn Innovation Platform, a tech incubator; and a magnetic resonance imaging machine, which will anchor the university’s first brain imaging center, and features a high performance mechanical system that will help pressurize lab spaces.

Additionally, Glumac provided Energy Modeling, which supported optimizing the energy efficiency of the building façade while keeping the aesthetics of the building in line with the campus vision. Glumac also created an in depth calculation to capture the efficiency of the campus’ central cooling plant, and combined heat and power plants to allow the project to earn all of the points available for the Optimize Energy Performance credit for LEED Gold, which it has achieved.

The building design includes a learning opportunity for students with windows into the central plant and an accompanying mural describing the engineering systems utilized in the building.

Size: 85,000 sf
Construction Cost: $95M
Start/End Date: 2015/2018
Architect: AC Martin & Partners
Contractor: Clark Construction
Owner: San Diego State University
Services: MEP Engineering, Energy Analysis

Images courtesy of Perspective in Pixels