Kresge College Expansion at the University of California, Santa Cruz

2024 Design Awards Honor Recipient

Kresge College Expansion at the University of California, Santa Cruz

Located in an ecologically sensitive environment on the UCSC campus, the Kresge College Expansion reinforces and layers onto an existing heritage campus by MLTW. Kresge College is reinvigorated with a new academic center at the nexus of the original campus street along with a trio of new residential buildings that respond to the University’s pressing need for more student housing. The project’s goal of connecting with the surrounding forest and the campus core is achieved with sensitivity to scale and building placement, always with deference to the majesty of the redwoods, and a newly accessible ravine bridge that provides more welcoming connections to the greater UCSC campus. At the campus scale, the original pedestrian street is extended into an activated loop path, with social spaces that flow into the residential buildings’ shared ground-floor amenities. The street culminates with the new academic center, which employs a technique common to the local polypore fungi to negotiate the site’s steep topography: simultaneously stepping down the slope and flaring out. The expansion builds upon Kresge College’s founding theme of participatory democracy through a process of extensive student and community engagement leading to designs that enhance the original campus by increasing density, connectivity, and vitality.

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This is a spectacular project. The buildings were surgically inserted to let nature prevail. A sensitive architectural response to the site, with buildings carefully nested into the redwood forest, and bridging between the buildings, that elevates students above the forest floor.

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Measure 1: Design for Integration

From the placement of buildings to protect the health and biodiversity of the forest, to the use of mass timber hybrid structures to lower embodied carbon, design decisions were made to serve multiple aspects of sustainability. The residential buildings are woven into the forest to preserve the majority of redwoods and benefit from the shade provided by the tree canopy that reduces cooling loads. Bird-safe fritted glass and large operable windows enable views of nature and natural ventilation, and when combined with a high-performance envelope, reduce the size of mechanical systems. Heat recovery and night cooling eliminate the need for air conditioning while enabling mechanical filtered ventilation to kick in if needed during wildfire or other pollution events. To minimize water demand, the historic runnel system was rehabilitated and woven into circulation pathways and the natural topography to direct, capture, and filter stormwater for reuse. The cumulative impact provides a vibrant residential and academic environment that demonstrates how to live and learn with nature.

Measure 2: Design for Equitable Communities

Town halls were open to the public, bringing neighboring residents, often alumni, along with current students and faculty to share stories of the original Kresge College and discuss the expansion’s concepts and goals. As one of the largest UCSC projects since the College’s founding, benefits to the citizens of California were often debated in person and the press, providing ongoing feedback to the design team. The Academic Center will provide opportunities for greater research, learning, and collaboration across the UCSC campus, as well as welcome outside visitors, other colleges, lecturers, and the community.

Measure 3: Design for Ecosystems

A primary driver of the Kresge Expansion and Renewal project design was a reconnection of the living and working spaces to the surrounding redwood forest. The design provides visual and physical connections to the natural environment linking students, faculty, and staff more overtly to their ecosystems. Buildings, open spaces, and circulation were sited specifically to not only protect and connect with existing trees, vegetation, and topography but also to enable habitat continuity for the many nonhuman species inhabiting the campus and surrounding area.

Measure 4: Design for Water

The design includes a new sustainable water infrastructure with a storage capacity of more than 100,000 gallons. Stormwater is collected from Kresge College’s roofs and hardscapes, treated as non-potable water, and conveyed for reuse as toilet flushing to four new buildings. Two cisterns were installed, pedestrian walkways were widened, the existing runnel system was enhanced, and new circulation paths were integrated into the topography to facilitate a natural process of collecting and filtering stormwater runoff. Lastly, this new infrastructure included connections to the larger university campus, empowering UCSC to take a big step forward toward its water sustainability goals.

Measure 5: Design for Economy

Several factors contributed to cost challenges over the life of the project. Conceived prior to the pandemic, subsequent delays, wildfires, unusual winter storms, and an accelerating crisis of student housing shortages all exacerbated a history of high construction costs in the difficult Santa Cruz environment. Design and construction strategies to deliver the project with an increased program despite these challenges included net-to-gross efficiency and the use of “gross sf” as informal student study and social spaces, deliberate phasing of site work and staging to construct the four buildings in rapid sequence, and off-site prefabrication of mass timber and pac-wall components.

Measure 6: Design for Energy

Early in design, modeling iterations were used to identify that investing in the envelope yielded the highest efficiency value—minimizing the cost, energy, and maintenance requirements of mechanical conditioning. Weather analysis and the experience of nearby buildings supported a heavy reliance on natural ventilation for cooling, with airflow modeling utilized to optimize window size and placement to provide summer cooling in the majority of exterior rooms. An underfloor displacement system with night purge to pre-cool the floor slab is used in the auditorium. Heat recovery ventilators minimize winter ventilation loads. Water heating utilizes high-efficiency heat pumps.

Measure 7: Design for Well-Being

Critical to the design was the provision of fresh air and daylight for all the building occupants. The residential ‘butterfly’ window configurations were specifically configured to increase air movement into and out of the dorm rooms. The mechanical systems were designed with the primary focus on venting via fresh air in lieu of mechanically cooling with refrigerants. The classrooms and working spaces—including the central atrium—were provided with daylighting and operable screened windows. Lastly, all materials were specified to meet low-VOC thresholds.

Measure 8: Design for Resources

The design team’s selection of mass timber and dimensional lumber as the primary framing system for the majority of the four new buildings was guided by the team’s priority to reduce embodied carbon. Additional material strategies included the reuse of trees removed from the site. Where concrete was required structurally it was left exposed wherever possible in order to reduce the need for additional finish materials. Both steel and concrete were additionally to include a significant percentage of recycled content.

Measure 9: Design for Change

The investment in a high-performance envelope, daylighting, and optimized natural ventilation allows the new buildings to provide useful shelter during a utility outage. Raised access flooring, working spaces organized into flexible and varied ‘lobes,’ and student services organized into similar ‘bays’ along the primary circulation route allow for future re-configuration or redesignation. The design is made more resilient to change by respecting its ecosystem, not trying to control it. The vertical occupant density; siting of the buildings, exterior circulation and gathering spaces; and development of stormwater infrastructure all work with and because of the surrounding forest.

Measure 10: Design for Discovery

Kresge’s new buildings respond to and expand the College’s original design. The expansion retains the qualities of surprise and free-spiritedness that have defined Kresge College for fifty years, while at the same time opening it up to students of all abilities. Throughout the campus, spaces are designed to enhance connections among students, the wider university community, and the ecology of the site. From campus-wide vantage points that situate students among the redwoods to custom-designed bird frit, the Kresge College expansion makes abundant efforts to create a playful dialogue with its surrounding environment.