Sustainability

Cultivating Collaborative Innovation at UCSD’s Jacobs School of Engineering

New LEED-Certified Building Provides “Collaboratories” for Interdisciplinary Research Focused on Real-World Problems

Published 5-11-2022

The University of California San Diego’s Jacobs School of Engineering just opened Franklin Antonio Hall, a 187,000-gsf LEED platinum building that contains 13 collaborative laboratories, two 100-seat active learning classrooms, faculty offices, a 250-seat learning innovation studio, and a 2,000-gsf café. The “collaboratory” concept informs tenant selection, group adjacency planning, and space customization processes, with an eye toward fostering collaboration between different fields of research and industry partners. Cross-discipline, faculty-led research groups will share collaboratory spaces and focus on real-world issues, such as renewable energy technologies, smart cities and smart transportation, wearable and robotics innovations, real-time data analysis and decision making, digital privacy and security, nanotechnology, and precision medicine. The building design and construction process was also highly collaborative, utilizing an integrated CM/GC approach that brought together all players to form a cohesive team.