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Arcat Detailed Podcast Episode
107: Low Carbon Concrete | UC San Diego Design and Innovation Building
45m 25s |
In this episode, Cherise is joined by Ivan Chabra, AIA, LEED AP, Architect and Senior Associate at EHDD Architecture with offices in San Francisco, California and Seattle, Washington. They discuss the UC San Diego Design and Innovation Building in San Diego, California.
The Design and Innovation Building at UC San Diego is a vibrant hub for creativity and entrepreneurship, reflecting a forward-thinking vision of multidisciplinary collaboration.
Its structure is not tied to any single department, enabling students, faculty, and visitors from diverse disciplines—ranging from engineering to visual arts—to engage in a dynamic environment that fosters ideation and engineered serendipity.
The Design and Innovation Building at UC San Diego is a vibrant hub for creativity and entrepreneurship, reflecting a forward-thinking vision of multidisciplinary collaboration.
Its structure is not tied to any single department, enabling students, faculty, and visitors from diverse disciplines—ranging from engineering to visual arts—to engage in a dynamic environment that fosters ideation and engineered serendipity.
Photos Credit: Cesar Rubio (Photography), EHDD (Renderings), Deborah Liu
(Ivan’s headshot)
Ivan is a thoughtful collaborator who is energized by the specific parameters of each project. His combination of high aspirations and a relaxed demeanor creates a fertile environment for design exploration and refinements.
Informed by a generalist mindset and an ethic of making, Ivan is as comfortable questioning underlying project assumptions as he is diving into the details of its implementation. Drawing on a range and depth of experience, Ivan seeks a precise yet relaxed architecture, imbued with a sense of its time and place, and creating a positive impact for the people it serves.
The new Design and Innovation Building serves as a campus hub for multidisciplinary instruction and research in design, innovation, and entrepreneurship.
The 70,000 square foot instructional space is shared across university departments; the building provides dedicated workspaces for design and research projects supported by faculty and graduate student offices, collaborative open work areas, and a range of meeting rooms.
A suite of prototyping labs and fabrication shops supports both instruction and research, allowing projects to be tested while fostering a culture of making.
While The Design & Innovation Building has only been open for a couple of years, it is already a campus hub for innovation and entrepreneurship. It’s purposely not part of any specific college or department, and is the home to a startup incubator, maker spaces, and dedicated project rooms, meeting spaces and offices.
In the words of UCSD Chancellor Pradeep Kohsla at the opening of the building, it is designed “to gather faculty and students across disciplines, engage our staff and visitors, forge connections with industry, and fully embrace the process of invention, from start to finish. ”
The Design & Innovation Building is intentionally not part of a single college, school, or department, but instead the building as a whole is administered at the university level and draws students and faculty from a variety of school and disciplines, from engineering to visual arts, management to cognitive science. The governance of the building is structured to foster a “supported autonomy” of four distinct programs that operate on the four floors of the building.
The ground floor is administered by an incubator/accelerator called “The Basement” which provides support to students interested in developing ideas and businesses from throughout the university.
On the second floor is the UCSD Makerspace, an open-access, community focused workshop with woodworking, metalworking, electronics, and digital fabrication facilities.
The third floor is the home of the Design Lab, which highlights the need for human-centered design.
And on the fourth floor is the Entrepreneurship Center, which provides support for implementing ideas, businesses, and products out in the world.
The Design & Innovation Building is an analog for the design process, where you can follow the journey of an idea, a team, and a project from its ideation, through its prototyping, through its development and refinement, to its funding and implementation.
EHDD worked with the Building Advisory Committee, which included faculty, students and administrators, to understand the spatial needs of a wide variety of projects that would take place in the building. We found that other than the equipment-heavy fabrication shops, the spaces that would best serve this range of projects, initiatives and types of innovation were non -specific. To remain a hub for innovation, the spaces must be used in different ways over the building's life.
We focused on providing what we called “resourced flexibility”: well-proportioned, flexible, daylit spaces grouped in neighborhoods within the building that include nearby private offices, meeting rooms of various sizes, and open collaboration areas. And it’s these collaboration areas that are in many ways the heart of the building.
You pass by them as you walk through the hallway, but they’re out of the circulation path, giving you the opportunity, but not the requirement, to engage with colleagues, students, and faculty.
This “engineered serendipity” intentionally provides spaces of overlap where people from different disciplines working on different projects have a chance to interact. It also operates at a larger scale at the open stair that connects all four levels, as well as at the ground floor restaurant space, and th e generous 2nd floor terrace which overlooks the outdoor amphitheater.
For these for shared collaboration spaces with non-rectilinear geometries that had to fulfill various functions, we used VR and real time rendering to explore multiple options with the Building Advisory Committee. We also conducted all our internal reviews in VR, making this one of our first projects in our office to really leverage VR in the design process.
For The Design & Innovation Building to be both inviting to passersby and a dynamic hub for students, it needed to be a space of wellness and joy, prioritizing transparency, openness and daylight.
On the ground floor, all the major spaces open out to the campus surroundings with large vertical lifting doors. The 2nd level, where all the maker spaces are located, is almost entirely glazed, allowing trolley riders to see into the wood and metal shops on the east, and allowing projects to spill out onto a large working terrace to the west.
On the 3rd and 4th floors, the floor-to-ceiling glazing in the main dedicated project rooms angle to the north to provide more usable daylight. The upper part of the building volume is cut, perforated, and skewed to bring daylight and a sense of connection deep into the floor plate.
The result is an environment filled with daylight, where you always have a sense of the activities going on around you, with spaces that are a draw for the entire University community.
The Design & Innovation Building is along a new major east-west campus connector and pedestrian axis (Rupertus Lane), and right next to the new UCSD station of San Diego’s Blue Line Trolley.
The trolley extension and station opened at almost exactly the same time as the building in 2021, and it connects the campus not only to downtown San Diego, but also all the way to the border crossing in San Ysidro.
The Design & Innovation Building is also part of a redevelopment of the whole surrounding Pepper Canyon area, including an outdoor amphitheater that was completed in 2022, 1300 units of new student housing coming online this year, and more housing to come in Pepper Canyon East, across the trolley line from The Design & Innovation Building.
At the nexus of these flows and newly generated activity, The Design & Innovation Building becomes an inviting and dynamic front door to the campus. Its location gives everyone passing by a window into the work that is going on inside, telling the story of what is happening not only in the building but at the University.
Easy access from the trolley also helps to craft a campus that is more open to the community and more equitably accessible to people from throughout the region. And the trolley a connects The Design & Innovation Building to a new UCSD innovation and cultural hub in downtown San Diego, both buildings inviting in advisors and entrepreneurs to work with students and faculty.
Certified as LEED Gold, the building utilized a low carbon concrete with Type 1L cement which is also leveraged as a primary interior finish. With these concrete floors, predominantly white walls and open-to- structure ceilings, the building’s industrial aesthetic allows students and faculty the agency to use and transform spaces as needed. The rough and ready aesthetic supports user agency, reduces embodied carbon, and includes isolated touches of more refined materials.
Ivan Chabra, AIA, LEED AP, Architect, Senior Associate at EHDD Architecture.
Ivan is a thoughtful collaborator who is energized by the specific parameters of each project. His combination of high aspirations and a relaxed demeanor creates a fertile environment for design exploration and refinements.
Informed by a generalist mindset and an ethic of making, Ivan is as comfortable questioning underlying project assumptions as he is diving into the details of its implementation. Drawing on a range and depth of experience, Ivan seeks a precise yet relaxed architecture, imbued with a sense of its time and place, and creating a positive impact for the people it serves.
Project Name and Location: UC San Diego Design and Innovation Building, San Diego California
The new Design and Innovation Building serves as a campus hub for multidisciplinary instruction and research in design, innovation, and entrepreneurship.
The 70,000 square foot instructional space is shared across university departments; the building provides dedicated workspaces for design and research projects supported by faculty and graduate student offices, collaborative open work areas, and a range of meeting rooms.
A suite of prototyping labs and fabrication shops supports both instruction and research, allowing projects to be tested while fostering a culture of making.
The success of the UC Sand Diego Design & Innovation Building
While The Design & Innovation Building has only been open for a couple of years, it is already a campus hub for innovation and entrepreneurship. It’s purposely not part of any specific college or department, and is the home to a startup incubator, maker spaces, and dedicated project rooms, meeting spaces and offices.
In the words of UCSD Chancellor Pradeep Kohsla at the opening of the building, it is designed “to gather faculty and students across disciplines, engage our staff and visitors, forge connections with industry, and fully embrace the process of invention, from start to finish. ”
Non-departmental building governance & organization of building as analog of design process
The Design & Innovation Building is intentionally not part of a single college, school, or department, but instead the building as a whole is administered at the university level and draws students and faculty from a variety of school and disciplines, from engineering to visual arts, management to cognitive science. The governance of the building is structured to foster a “supported autonomy” of four distinct programs that operate on the four floors of the building.
The ground floor is administered by an incubator/accelerator called “The Basement” which provides support to students interested in developing ideas and businesses from throughout the university.
On the second floor is the UCSD Makerspace, an open-access, community focused workshop with woodworking, metalworking, electronics, and digital fabrication facilities.
The third floor is the home of the Design Lab, which highlights the need for human-centered design.
And on the fourth floor is the Entrepreneurship Center, which provides support for implementing ideas, businesses, and products out in the world.
The Design & Innovation Building is an analog for the design process, where you can follow the journey of an idea, a team, and a project from its ideation, through its prototyping, through its development and refinement, to its funding and implementation.
Resourced flexibility
EHDD worked with the Building Advisory Committee, which included faculty, students and administrators, to understand the spatial needs of a wide variety of projects that would take place in the building. We found that other than the equipment-heavy fabrication shops, the spaces that would best serve this range of projects, initiatives and types of innovation were non -specific. To remain a hub for innovation, the spaces must be used in different ways over the building's life.
We focused on providing what we called “resourced flexibility”: well-proportioned, flexible, daylit spaces grouped in neighborhoods within the building that include nearby private offices, meeting rooms of various sizes, and open collaboration areas. And it’s these collaboration areas that are in many ways the heart of the building.
You pass by them as you walk through the hallway, but they’re out of the circulation path, giving you the opportunity, but not the requirement, to engage with colleagues, students, and faculty.
This “engineered serendipity” intentionally provides spaces of overlap where people from different disciplines working on different projects have a chance to interact. It also operates at a larger scale at the open stair that connects all four levels, as well as at the ground floor restaurant space, and th e generous 2nd floor terrace which overlooks the outdoor amphitheater.
For these for shared collaboration spaces with non-rectilinear geometries that had to fulfill various functions, we used VR and real time rendering to explore multiple options with the Building Advisory Committee. We also conducted all our internal reviews in VR, making this one of our first projects in our office to really leverage VR in the design process.
Daylighting and transparency
For The Design & Innovation Building to be both inviting to passersby and a dynamic hub for students, it needed to be a space of wellness and joy, prioritizing transparency, openness and daylight.
On the ground floor, all the major spaces open out to the campus surroundings with large vertical lifting doors. The 2nd level, where all the maker spaces are located, is almost entirely glazed, allowing trolley riders to see into the wood and metal shops on the east, and allowing projects to spill out onto a large working terrace to the west.
On the 3rd and 4th floors, the floor-to-ceiling glazing in the main dedicated project rooms angle to the north to provide more usable daylight. The upper part of the building volume is cut, perforated, and skewed to bring daylight and a sense of connection deep into the floor plate.
The result is an environment filled with daylight, where you always have a sense of the activities going on around you, with spaces that are a draw for the entire University community.
Front door to campus, terrace overlooking amphitheater
The Design & Innovation Building is along a new major east-west campus connector and pedestrian axis (Rupertus Lane), and right next to the new UCSD station of San Diego’s Blue Line Trolley.
The trolley extension and station opened at almost exactly the same time as the building in 2021, and it connects the campus not only to downtown San Diego, but also all the way to the border crossing in San Ysidro.
The Design & Innovation Building is also part of a redevelopment of the whole surrounding Pepper Canyon area, including an outdoor amphitheater that was completed in 2022, 1300 units of new student housing coming online this year, and more housing to come in Pepper Canyon East, across the trolley line from The Design & Innovation Building.
At the nexus of these flows and newly generated activity, The Design & Innovation Building becomes an inviting and dynamic front door to the campus. Its location gives everyone passing by a window into the work that is going on inside, telling the story of what is happening not only in the building but at the University.
Easy access from the trolley also helps to craft a campus that is more open to the community and more equitably accessible to people from throughout the region. And the trolley a connects The Design & Innovation Building to a new UCSD innovation and cultural hub in downtown San Diego, both buildings inviting in advisors and entrepreneurs to work with students and faculty.
Concrete (UCSD campus aesthetics – modern arch, Salk Institute nearby) – Type 1L (low carbon) & Rough and ready aesthetic
Certified as LEED Gold, the building utilized a low carbon concrete with Type 1L cement which is also leveraged as a primary interior finish. With these concrete floors, predominantly white walls and open-to- structure ceilings, the building’s industrial aesthetic allows students and faculty the agency to use and transform spaces as needed. The rough and ready aesthetic supports user agency, reduces embodied carbon, and includes isolated touches of more refined materials.
- iCMaR cost decision leading to design elements:
- custom profile metal panel – serrated expression of building and materials
- PT concrete slab – plan flexibility for varying layouts of floor, and envelope form
- Navigating fire code to achieve Porosity + Interconnection of levels
Project Team List:
- Design Team: EHDD Architecture
- General Contractor: BNBuilders
- Structural Engineer: Rutherford & Chekene
- Mechanical/Electrical/Plumbing Engineer: Point Energy Innovations
- Acoustics/AV/Telecom: Charles M. Salter Assoc. Inc.
- LEED: AR Green Consulting
- Specifications: Specifications West LLC
- Lighting: Architecture & Light
- Civil: Nasland
- Landscape Architect: OJB
