San Diego State University Engineering and Interdisciplinary Sciences Building
Tetra Tech’s High Performance Buildings Group provided mechanical, electrical, plumbing, and energy modeling services for San Diego State University.
Facts
- Size: 85,000 square feet
- Construction Cost: $95 million
- Client/Owner: San Diego State University
- Architect: AC Martin & Partners
- Contractor: Clark Construction
- Completion Date: 2018
The university was driven by its goal of becoming a top-50 public research university and realized that to reach this goal, they needed to replace the campus’ Industrial Technology building with a state-of-the-art Engineering and Interdisciplinary Sciences building. The project acted as a melting pot of collaboration between engineers, biologists, climatologists, and entrepreneurs.
Tetra Tech provided bridging documents and peer review of mechanical, electrical, and plumbing system designs for the new 90,000-square-foot, five-story, design-build project. It included 17 multidisciplinary laboratories, a nanofabrication suite, research spaces, instructional spaces, a clean room, and a magnetic resonance imaging machine, which anchors the university’s first brain imaging center. The building also features a high performance mechanical system that helps pressurize lab spaces.
Additionally, Tetra Tech provided energy modeling, which supported optimizing the building façade’s energy efficiency while keeping the aesthetics of the building in line with the campus vision. Tetra Tech also created an in-depth calculation to capture the efficiency of the campus’ central cooling plant and combined heat and power plants to enable the project to achieve the Optimize Energy Performance credit for LEED Gold Certification.
The building design includes a learning opportunity for students with windows into the central plant and an accompanying mural describing the engineering systems used in the building.
Images courtesy of Perspective in Pixels
