Wexford and UC Davis Inaugurate Aggie Square in Sacramento

The University of California, Davis celebrated the opening of a $1.1 billion destination for collaborative discovery in May of 2025 in Sacramento. Spanning 767,000 sf, the first phase of Aggie Square was designed by ZGF Architects as the flagship for a new model of innovation district that strategically collocates academic, industry, and community partners not only in the same building, but in many cases on the same floor. Wexford Science & Technology was the developer for the public-private project, which features two 250,000-sf buildings offering leading-edge environments for life sciences, biomedical engineering, technology, and data sciences.

UC Davis will occupy 60 percent of these highly integrated facilities, which provide wet and dry labs, flexible offices, modern classrooms, community areas, and multipurpose venues. A transparent, university-run makerspace on the ground floor puts research on display. At Wexford’s Connect Labs incubator, scale-in-place infrastructure is available for emerging companies, including pre-built and furnished lab, support, and office options with a curated set of amenities, services, and shared equipment.

Aggie Square seamlessly knits together welcoming public zones and pedestrian-focused settings into the heart of a major research hospital. A third 250,000-sf structure houses offices and classrooms, and a 190-apartment residential building supplies 252 beds to support this new knowledge ecosystem. A central plaza functions as an outdoor room for informal exchange, mobile work, and social gatherings, and a parking garage for 1,550 vehicles has also been constructed. The Market Green and a mobility plaza are slated to add further cohesion to the site.

As the first all-electric innovation district of its scale, the sustainable development exceeds California’s Title 24 requirements by 30 percent through energy-efficient systems, including hydronic heating and cooling, and is targeting LEED Gold certification. Whiting-Turner served as general contractor and Affiliated Engineers (AEI) was the MEP engineer. Ground was broken on the project in February of 2022.