Campus Gateway

New UC Irvine Humanities Building Offers “Tricky” Design

By Greg Aragon

When UC Irvine’s new 76,000-sq-ft Humanities Gateway Building is completed in July of next year, it is expected to be an iconic campus structure.

“The building reflects historical context, yet is innovative; it is formal, yet spontaneous,” says Curt Fentress, design principal for Denver-based Fentress Architects, the company in charge of the design-build project. “It respects the architectural vocabulary of the campus on its entry side, then breaks free, expressing the inquiry and delight characteristic of the humanities on its opposing face.”

Hensel Phelps Construction Co. of Greeley, Colorado, is serving as general contractor on the $38 million project, which broke ground in October of last year.

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As the fifth building in the Humanities Quad, the new structure will help satisfy the school’s need for additional classroom, office and administrative space. It will provide state-of-the-art facilities for art history, film and media studies and will include a 110-seat auditorium and a film screening room, an editing room, and an equipment room.
In addition, many of the school’s multidisciplinary centers will be housed in the building, including the International Center for Writing and Translation, the Humanities Research Institute, and the Dr. Samuel M. Jordan Center for Persian Studies and Culture.

As part of the project’s goal of attaining a LEED silver rating, the architect designed two three-story light wells in the center of the building.

“This cost-effective solution avoided an expensive atrium with extensive code requirements while producing a similar amenity with enhanced benefits,” Fentress says.

There will also be two first-floor conference rooms that will open up to an 8,000-sq-ft landscaped court for outdoor gatherings.

Fentress describes the design as “janusfaced,” a reference to Janus, the mythological Roman god of doorways and gateways, who with two faces looked to both the past and future.

The four-story building’s southeast façade will complement the college’s existing architectural history with firm, structural cast-in-place concrete lines. The northwest façade, which looks into the quad, will aim to the future with a dramatic geode-like wall of undulating glass and serpentine concrete.

Rob DeSpain, project manager for Hensel Phelps, says he knew from the start that the design would be intricate and tricky.  

“The whole back half is on curving, cantilevered, exposed concrete slabs, and nothing lines up,” says DeSpain, whose company is working on its ninth project at the school. “Because it is exposed concrete, there is no repairing it if you make a mistake.”

He adds that every layout line on the curve is checked at least two or three times by quality-control people to insure construction stays within the tolerances so that the roughly 50,000 sq ft of glass all fits into place.

To help with the complicated drawings, DeSpain says crews are using Revit Architecture, a 3D design modeling tool.

“[This program] is the next big tool in architecture and design,” he says. “It’s not just 3-D Autocad. You can give it definitions and once you have the model built, anybody can have the model and take a cut of it, so if you are missing a detail you can ask for a cut anywhere in the building and nobody has to redraw it.”

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