Archinect - News

Amidst increasing wildfires, should we retreat or regroup? A UC Davis proposal recommends taking the high road despite challenges

2022-07-19T16:13:00-04:00

As Spain, France, Greece, and Germany grapple with a spate of historic wildfires that have gripped the region in recent weeks, a group of researchers in the American West is now advocating for fairly extreme shifts in development trends there which would buck others currently favored by the industry that involve more direct applications of design in the built environment.

Writing in FastCompany this week, UC Davis professors Emily Schlickman, Brett Milligan, and Stephen M. Wheeler proposed a three-point plan that entails zoning changes (including San Diego’s approach of avoiding hillside development) and placing severe limitations on new construction, which are seen as a large part of the problem in Northern California and other places.

The trio pointed to recent examples from Los Angeles County and an existing law in Oregon as frameworks that could easily be adopted in the sunshine state, backed up by aggressive legal measures and incentivizations that would further prevent develo...

ZGF's Aggie Square development at UC Davis takes a step forward

2020-07-09T17:46:00-04:00

The first phase of a new ZGF-designed innovation district slated for the University of California, Davis campus has taken a step forward.

The 1.2 million-square-foot development will span 8.25 acres and is set to include 200 housing units, 500,000 square feet of science, technology and engineering spaces, 250,000 square feet of classroom and coworking facilities, and 30,000 square feet of commercial uses, all spread out across four buildings.

View of the new buildings surrounding Aggie Square.

For the private-public partnership project, coordinated between the university and developers Wexford Science & Technology, ZGF has designed a series modulated glass-wrapped mid-rise towers surrounding the development's namesake plaza. The buildings offer porous connections to the tree-filled plaza space, and feature arcades and ground floor commercial spaces.

The district is designed specifically to "co-locate private industry investment, robust 'innovation infrastructure' for startups, as w...

SO-IL's new museum for UC Davis: "a building to boost your faith in the future of American architecture"

2016-12-08T13:28:00-05:00

The museum is not a singular or path-breaking work of architecture; its design goals have more to do with manipulating light and shadow and with physical substance [...] Yet taken as a whole the museum offers a range of encouraging signs about the priorities of architecture’s up-and-coming generation. These include a genuine interest in shifting definitions of public space in a digital age and — most important of all — a preference for measured and layered effects over operatic ones.

UC Davis' new Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of art opened in November, and will function as a teaching museum with spaces for studios, galleries, and classrooms, including a courtyard for performances and installations.

According to Hawthorne, SO-IL's design (done in collaboration Karl Backus of Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, an SF-based firm known for its multiple Apple stores), "flows primarily from [SO-IL leaders] Idenburg, 42, and Liu, 37, whose work tends to be porous and substantial at the same time, with cubic forms often cloaked or veiled by snug, semi-transparent skins." Hawthorne also refers back to SO-IL's YAP-winning "Pole Dance", as a tone-setter for the firm's aesthetic.

Check out Iwan Baan's photos of the museum below.

Get the backsotry on SO-IL and the Shrem museum here:

UC Davis selects SO – IL to design art museum

2013-05-01T18:30:00-04:00

UC Davis today announced that it has selected an emerging New York-based design firm, SO – IL, to design the campus’s planned art museum, envisioned as a regional center of experimentation, participation and learning. The firm will work with team members Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, a prominent architectural firm with offices in San Francisco, Seattle and Pennsylvania, and contractor Whiting-Turner, a national construction firm...

The new museum advances the way museums and architecture are approached in the 21st century.

Designed by SO - IL in partnership with Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, and built by Whiting-Turner, the design incorporates a 50,000 square foot steel structure that floats atop a series of interconnected interior and exterior spaces. The gallery space will be 29,000 square feet.

In describing the building, the architects state:

Davis is an ideal setting for a museum that will sow new ways of thinking about the experience of art. The Central Valley breathes a spirit of optimism. Whether one is influenced by the sweeping views over the flat plains beyond to the horizon, or the sense of empowerment one feels when being able to cultivate and grow freely—the spirit of this place is of invention and imagination. It is precisely this spirit we capture in our architectural proposal for the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art.

As an overarching move, the design proposes a 50,000 s...

WORKac, Henning Larsen and SO – IL compete to design UC Davis art museum

2012-12-06T14:00:00-05:00

The university believes this to be the first design-build competition for an art museum in this country. Each team gets four months to design a museum and prepare a bid for the museum.

The teams competing to build the museum are:

Contractor: Kitchell; design architect: WORKac; executive architect: Westlake Reed Leskosky
Contractor: Oliver and Co.; design architect: Henning Larsen Architects; executive architect: Gould Evans
Contractor: Whiting-Turner; design architect: SO – IL; executive architect: Bohlin Cywinski Jackson