SAN DIEGO-McCarthy Building Cos. Inc. has begun construction for the new 180,000-square-foot, four-story Math and Science Building in the heart of San Diego Mesa College, located at 7250 Mesa College Dr. in the Clairemont area of San Diego. The new Math and Science Building will occupy the area immediately east of the existing Learning and Resource Building and south of the I-300 Building.

Last November, construction crews began disassembling three older buildings on the campus before performing hard demolition and breaking ground for the new facility. Construction is being carefully monitored and managed to minimize disruption to regular campus activities, according to a prepared statement.

The new $92 million instructional building is being funded by the $1.555-billion Propositions S and N construction bond program, which is providing for new teaching and learning facilities, major renovations and campus infrastructure projects at Mesa, City and Miramar colleges, and six continuing education campuses. Completion is slated for March 2013.

“Both students and faculty members can look forward to this being a wonderful new addition to the San Diego Mesa College campus,” says David Umstot, vice chancellor of facilities management for the San Diego Community College District, in a prepared statement. “The Math and Science Building is more technically complex than most construction projects, and we believe McCarthy is best suited to build it based on their extensive experience with laboratories and higher education construction projects, not to mention their excellent performance on the Allied Health Building.”

According to McCarthy project director Robert Betz, one of the biggest challenges facing the construction team is the project's location on a compact 200,000-square-foot site, right in the middle of the campus. “Project access is a major issue that will pose ingress/egress as well as subcontractor scheduling challenges throughout the two-year build-out,” Betz says. “We have worked with the District to devise a plan that will allow us to work within the site constraints while causing the least amount of disruption possible to traffic and ongoing activities.”

Designed by Architects | Delawie Wilkes Rodrigues Barker, the new San Diego Mesa College Math and Science Building will house four floors of classrooms, laboratory space and offices for the departments of biology, chemistry, mathematics, and physical sciences. Additionally, several faculty/student interaction areas have been incorporated into the building's design, says a statement. The new Math and Science Building will be constructed of structural steel with concrete shear walls and an exterior curtain wall.

The building’s design incorporates numerous sustainable features, with the project team targeting LEED Silver Certification by the USGBC. All classrooms, teaching laboratories, and the majority of the staff offices will optimize the use of natural daylight. In addition, many of the interior finishes at the new San Diego Mesa College Math and Science Building will be made from recycled material or rapidly renewable sources, such as bamboo. Construction waste also will be recycled.

Project team consultants for the new San Diego Mesa College Math and Science Building include Hope Engineering for structural engineering, and X-nth for mechanical and electrical engineering. The program manager for the Propositions S and N construction program for the San Diego Community College District is Gafcon.

This is the second major project McCarthy has worked on at San Diego Mesa College on behalf of the San Diego Community College District. The company also built the new three-story, 50,000-square-foot Allied Health Building, which was completed in August of 2009.

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McCarthy Starts $92M Build at San Diego Mesa College

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