Institutional Focus: A Gift to the City

This confidential University engaged DesignGroup to develop and deliver their vision to create a new, interdisciplinary home for their already well-established Health Sciences programs and create a new public facing “gateway” for the institution.

The mixed-use development will be delivered through public-private partnership (P3) arrangements and will include 120,000 SF of state of the art academic health science space, 250,000 SF of market-rate residential units, 80,000 SF of Class-A office spaces, 20,000 SF of commercial/retail spaces, and approximately 400 structured parking spaces, all organized around a new public plaza / park located at a major intersection in an urban core.

This conceptual project effort began with a study of massing options and stacking diagrams for alignment of new program with existing campus space, and for understanding how this complex program could fit on a small site. Equally important for this study was the understanding of existing site constraints including physical constraints such as topography and utilities, as well as the emotional constraints for new development within an active neighborhood and busy urban corridor. Each of these constraints inform the site opportunities for placemaking, of knitting the campus together in plan and section, of providing space for the public as a gift to the city.