SAN DIEGO-McCarthy Building Companies Inc. has started construction on a new, $105 million, 196,000-square-foot Health Sciences Biomedical Research Facility in La Jolla that is part of an ongoing expansion at the UC San Diego School of Medicine. The new facility is on a 3.3-acre site within the School of Medicine campus and is targeted for LEED Platinum certification.

The new research laboratory will serve a function similar to the existing 145,000-square-foot UCSD School of Medicine Leichtag Family Foundation for Biomedical Research Building, which McCarthy completed in spring 2004. Boone Hellmann, campus architect for UCSD, heads the Facilities Design and Construction office charged with implementing the $105 million project, with James Gillie, senior director of construction services for UCSD, supervising construction and Pnina Goldberg charged with overall project management. Completion is scheduled for August 2013.

Designed by ZGF Architects LLP, the research building will incorporate a combination of concrete, curtain wall, metal panels and terra cotta cladding. It will include wet labs, open lab space, lab support, and administrative support space on five stories above ground, with core lab space and support mechanical, electrical and plumbing systems located in the basement.

Hellmann says that the project team is expecting the building “to be the highest-performing and most sustainably designed research lab on the UCSD campus and quite possibly in the country.” Design features of the building include dynamic, computer-controlled exterior solar shading systems on the east, west and south facades, representing the most extensive use of this type of shading by any building in the UC system.

According to Bob Betz, project director for McCarthy, the most challenging aspect of construction will be the lab space and certain areas of the overhead construction. KPFF of Portland and San Diego is the structural engineer for the new facility, with IBE Consulting Engineers of Sherman Oaks as the mechanical and plumbing engineer, and Integrated Engineering Consultants of Los Angeles as the electrical engineer. Spurlock Poirier of San Diego is the landscape architect. RFD, also of San Diego, is the laboratory-planning consultant.