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PCC Amenities 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 50,000 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 Amenities Building houses the conference center, dining facility, 300-seat auditorium, fitness center, health center, and multi-purpose rooms. The conference facility provides meeting and learning spaces that are flexible to accommodate varying group sizes while presenting new models for collaborative learning environments. The great hall within the dining space is a transparent pavilion with direct connections to outdoor dining terraces overlooking the sports field and entry courtyard. The fitness facility is located on the second floor with adjacent roof terraces to host outdoor fitness classes. The “Center for the Future of Health” is an environment designed to inspire the next generation of health centers, including an optometry exam room and store, physical therapy, acupuncture, meditation, telemedicine room, triage room and six exam rooms.

Impact + Innovation

The Amenities Building serves as a living example of the integration of building and site technologies to achieve environmental sensitivity. The Amenities Building, along with the Research and Development 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. By utilizing passive design strategies, including natural ventilation, thermal mass, a green roof, and exterior shading, the project is able to pull in the outdoor environment and provide a comfortable interior environment in ways that support the project design and achieve these goals.

Process

The program for the Pacific Center Campus Amenities Building was derived from a visioning process that identified employees’ priorities and combined dining, training, exercise, and wellness services into a single building. Health and wellness were key aspects of the design objectives, thus, the design focused on connecting employees to nature, daylight, views, and connecting people to each other to create a sense of community. On the ground level, the hall within the dining center is a transparent pavilion with connections to dining terraces on the courtyard. The conference center, which also opens to the courtyard, is a multifunction event space that can be divided into separate rooms. To maximize the amount of usable area on the campus, the design team considered the space between each building, extending the campus experience to the outdoors. Mounting evidence that exposure to daylight produces healthier and happier people was a key factor in the design parti. More than 95% of regularly occupied spaces have daylight and views, due to the vast glazing at the north and south elevations.

Sustainability

91% of regularly occupied spaces provided with daylight and views (excluding the auditorium)
112-136 kBTU/sf/year modeled performance (vs 140 kBtu/sf/year energy budget of baseline building)
25% savings beyond code minimum
More than 78% of on-site generated construction waste was diverted from landfills
26% of total materials content, by value, were manufactured using recycled materials
5% of the materials used were salvaged
13% of the total building materials value includes materials and products that were manufactured and extracted within 500 miles of the project site
34% total water reduction
64% total processed kitchen water savings
90% of stormwater runoff water passes through self-treating green roof modular wetland system

People

Team

James Pfeiffer
Steve McDowell
Adam Wiechman
Hans Nettelblad
Elvis Achelpohl
Alyssa Parsons
Beena Ramaswami
Matthew Porreca
Elif Tinney
Celina Echezaretta
John Ambert
Matt Winter
Chad Jamie-Rigaud
Danielle Buttacavoli

Client

Qualcomm

[The Amenities Building is] masterful in doing what some of the best architecture does by integrating with the landscape and defining great exterior space.

AIA Iowa Jury Comments, 2017

[The Amenities Building] succeeds in creating a porous yet well-defined space on the campus, appropriate to its shared amenities purpose. [Its] strong plan holds the circulation and outdoor deck to the perimeter, activating the court at ground level and above. [It] encourages and supports the indoor-outdoor lifestyle of the San Diego climate.

AIA Central States Jury Comments, 2016