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PCC Research and Development Building

A dynamic, indoor-outdoor campus environment provides a spectrum of workplace spaces that inspire employee well-being and productivity.

Information

Location San Diego, California
Size 357,000 SF
Completion 2014
Project Type Corporate
Certification LEED Gold

BNIM led the initial Campus Master Plan and Conceptual Design process for the Pacific Center Campus Development. Following this process, BNIM was again selected to lead the design of a two-building campus expansion.

The Research and Development (R&D) Building accommodates new office and laboratory spaces. Interior environments focus on enhancing employees’ individual surroundings to be more comfortable, inspiring, and healthier. Laboratories are centrally located with adjacent workplaces for teams to interact seamlessly with the research environment. Conference spaces are located at the building’s central gathering space to foster interaction, collaboration and innovation. The design approach for the R&D Building organized each of these program components distinctly, optimized them for each specific use to increase their individual performance and fully serve the needs of each user and the larger development.

Impact + Innovation

The Research and Development Building’s human-purposed, high-performance strategies have led to a 16-18% employee productivity increase. The design provides daylight throughout the building and views to the outdoors by utilizing east/west orientation and narrow floor plates, resulting in 84% floor area or work station with direct views of the outdoors and use of daylighting rather than artificial light sources. Visible and day-lit indoor and outdoor stairs connect the floors to each other and to the ground plain. The Research and Development Building, along with the Amenities Building, has received LEED Gold certification and was designed to optimize passive design strategies to achieve high-performance results. The new buildings are integrated into an overall campus environment that is organized around properly scaled public spaces, public amenities, and clear circulation systems. The campus experience aims to provide a dynamic social environment for employees, fostering a spirit of community while creating high-quality interior workplace environments to boost employee productivity.

Process

As part of BNIM’s human-purposed, integrated design process, the team held multiple visioning sessions, departmental interviews, and surveys with the company’s most valuable asset – its people. These sessions and data provided feedback that produced the guiding principles and identified an overarching goal: create a facility to attract and retain the top talent in the industry. The team set out to accomplish this goal by upending the idea of the traditional workplace and creating an environment that appealed to basic human nature. Major program components were organized to provide future flexibility, social interactions along the clear circulation systems and collaborative spaces while having clearly defined focus areas for the office and research spaces.

Sustainability

Accommodates 2,000 SF of photovoltaic array that can provide 54 MWh annually
Energy consumption is minimized by shifting 17.3% of program and circulation from conditioned interior spaces to exterior open-air spaces
Natural ventilation can operate for 60% of the building’s occupied hours (78° F cooling setpoint)
48% reduction from national EUI for building type
84% floor area or work station with direct views of the outdoors and use of daylighting rather than artificial light sources
16-18% employee productivity increase
97% virgin wood products in the building that use FSC wood
100% of stormwater treated on site 35% reduction in potable water (baselines LEED 2009)
Landscape utilizes drought-tolerant indigenous vegetation that requires minimal supplemental irrigation resulting in 81% reduction in potable water consumption for landscape

People

Team

James Pfeiffer
Steve McDowell
Jeff Shaffer
Hans Nettelblad
Jeremy Kahm
Adam Wiechman
Beena Ramaswami
Elvis Achelpohl
Rod Kruse
Carey Nagle
Sarah Hirsch
John Ambert
Celina Echezarreta
Elif Tinney
Matthew Winter
Chad-Jamie Rigaud
Matthew Porreca
Danielle Buttacavoli
Philip Bona
Christianne Jordan
Aaron Ross
Karen Krauskopf
Kyle Rogler
Brittany Gamble
Carly Pumphrey
Joshua Herberge
Nicholas Fratta
Sebren Ryan Camp
Jared Nook
Brian McKinney
Mellissa Leyendecker
Adam Cohen
Elias Logan
Rohn Grotenhuis
Erik Heitman
James Schuessler
Willia Bustos-Martinez
Barbara Cugno
Elise Hubbard
Arpit Balhara

The Pacific Center Campus Building really struck the jury in several ways. One is that it could have been a fairly banal office and research center, but it wasn’t. It really embraced the sense of sociology and workplace that clearly was desired. We loved the spacemaking — bending the bars and shaping them to create space in the center of essentially a mini campus, as well as the connection to the larger setting and the views beyond. These were both very strong.”

“Another piece that we loved about the project was the bridging: bridging both literally, the seamless, clean simple slabs that connected between the buildings, as well as bridging between the two buildings more visually and the visual connections, and having that center space as a showpiece in the middle of the campus.”

“When we were discussing this project, one of the things that really struck was the deliberate, beautiful, elegant way that the designers worked to connect people, but to also connect to the natural setting. Not only in terms of the massing of the project, down to the details, the view, the light, how buildings related to each other and created the courtyard as the centerpiece of all that.

AIA Kansas City Jury Comments, 2016

[This project] makes the everyday experience, and the health and well-being of the employee a top priority. The project goes beyond challenging the typical office building by becoming a lively and appropriate part of its environment.

AIA Iowa Excellence in Design Awards