Opened for the 2023 school year following two years of construction, the University of California, Riverside, School of Medicine’s new $100-million Education Building II (EDII) will help alleviate the region’s physician shortage. UCR’s largest expansion to its School of Medicine since the program launched in 2013, the Education Building II was created by design-build team Hensel Phelps and CO Architects. The building increases the School of Medicine’s class-size capacity to 125.
“This building will provide the much-needed space for our medical students, faculty and staff, and it provides a path for the expansion of our medical school class,” said Dr. Deborah Deas, vice chancellor of health sciences and the Mark and Pam Rubin Dean of the UCR School of Medicine.
“At the core of our design and construction efforts was the desire to support, promote, and advance the campus’s vision to create an inclusive and innovative learning environment, said Hensel Phelps’ Eric Bain, the project’s operations manager. “The new home for the School of Medicine is a focal point on campus and within the broader Riverside County community.”
The EDII’s design includes a large outdoor plaza that unifies and defines a new School of Medicine precinct on campus. The five-story building adds 95,476 gross square feet and 56,500 usable square feet. The building is meant to be both beautiful and durable, utilizing materials—such as cast-in-place concrete, brick, terracotta, and glass—that fit within the campus context and will last for generations.
Each façade is optimized for the climate and levels of sun exposure throughout the day. Vertical glass fiber reinforced concrete (GFRC) fins on the east façade cast dramatic extended shadows while protecting interior spaces from the harsh morning light. Painted perforated aluminum panels—featuring custom patterns that resonate with the scale and pattern of the building’s brickwork—shade the east and west exit stairs, screening the stairs behind and creating a larger architectural feature on the façades.
The same panels are used on the south façade to shade individual windows. The staggered window placement is interspersed with brick infill stacked vertically in rows to signify the use of the brick as a façade skin, rather than as load-bearing elements. The north entrance face of the building is porous, both visually with abundant glass and structurally with walls opening out to the courtyard. Inside, a three-story perforated gypsum mural represents an abstraction of orange groves as a nod to the region’s history as the Orange Empire.
The materials palette provides flexibility for expansion over time and allowed construction details to be easily executed and built. During constructability review, the team modeled the different exterior connections and material intersections to digitally ensure the details were constructible and would stand the test of time with limited or no maintenance. Utilizing the design-build delivery method, the EDII was able to fit within a strict budget and a demanding schedule.
The EDII was designed with long-term sustainability in mind to ensure it will remain fully functional for generations to come while minimizing its carbon footprint. Located in a drought-prone region, the building defends and restores the natural vegetative conditions of the site. The EDII’s use of transparency and shading optimizes passive elements of light, prevailing breezes, and solar heat gain. The interiors and exteriors utilize durable, easy-to-maintain, and sustainable building materials, as well as low/no-VOC materials that promote healthy interior air quality and performance. A 200-kilowatt solar array on the roof contributes to its energy efficiency. The EDII achieved highest-level LEED Platinum energy certification through its multiplicity of sustainability strategies in all building systems.
To maximize EDII’s lifespan, the design is flexible and adaptable to respond to growth as needs and pedagogy change. The building is organized with all the high-activity and student-centric learning spaces on the first three floors, which are more accessible and feature indoor/outdoor spaces, while administration and shared functions are located on the upper two floors. The EDII collocates most of the medical school’s staff, administrators, and faculty in the same building for the first time, creating greater efficiencies and moments for collaboration.
The medical school’s academic programs are supported by interactive classrooms, 15 case-based group seminar rooms, ample and various sized study rooms, and additional study and amenity spaces that work cohesively to integrate and support student engagement throughout the day and into the night. Throughout the building, the design team identified opportunities to enhance the program with high-profile spaces, such as an interactive tiered classroom that is universally accessible and features an abundance of daylight, state-of-the-art technology, write-up spaces, and informal lounge seating for breakout sessions.
“From the large lobby to a major staircase in the center of the building that includes wooden stadium-style seating alongside it, the building is designed to encourage collaboration and create a strong school community, said James Simeo, principal of CO Architects. “The architecture of the building is intrinsically linked to the visions and the goals of the School of Medicine to create open and transparent spaces to demystify medical education.”
About Hensel Phelps
Hensel Phelps is recognized as one of the premier general contracting firms in the United States since 1937, specializing in planning, building, and managing facilities in every building sector, including health care, aviation, higher education, federal, and justice. Our people are committed to delivering the highest quality solutions and creating the most innovative and efficient facilities for our clients, from conception through construction, operations, and asset management. As one of Southern California’s largest construction employers, our firm has been an engaged community partner in the Los Angeles, Orange County, and San Diego markets for more than 30 years.
About CO Architects
Los Angeles-based CO Architects is nationally recognized for architectural planning, programming, and design in the higher education, science and technology, and health care sectors, and works with leading institutions from coast to coast. CO Architects’ specialized expertise includes transformative schools of medicine and health professions, advanced research and teaching laboratories, and innovative clinical facilities on higher education, health care, and urban campuses. The firm has been nationally and internationally recognized with numerous awards for innovative design and project delivery, including the AIA California’s Architecture Firm of the Year Award.
About UCR
The University of California, Riverside, is a doctoral research university, a living laboratory for groundbreaking exploration of issues critical to Inland Southern California, the state, and communities around the world. Reflecting California’s diverse culture, UCR’s enrollment is more than 25,000 students. The campus has an annual statewide economic impact of almost $2 billion.
About the UCR School of Medicine
Opened in 2013, the UCR School of Medicine has a mission to improve the health of the people of California and, especially, to serve inland Southern California—a medically underserved region—by training a diverse workforce of physicians and developing innovative research and health care delivery programs that become models to be emulated throughout the state and nation. The community-based medical school also offers a doctoral program in biomedical sciences and operates or partners in several residency training and fellowship programs, including those in the medical specialties of family medicine, internal medicine, general surgery, pediatrics, psychiatry, and cardiovascular medicine.
