Structures
UCSD’s New Campus Gateway
The Pepper Canyon West Project
By Luke Carothers
The University of California San Diego’s Pepper Canyon West, a student housing project marking a new entrance to the campus, is slated to open in August 2024. The project is located on a six-acre site which houses two C-shaped buildings with prominent towers capable of housing a total of 1,304 upper-division students. On the ground level, these buildings contain retail and student amenity spaces that are purposefully designed to create an active, vibrant urban atmosphere. UCSD’s Pepper Canyon West Project began in 2018 when the RFP was issued as a progressive design-build package. Perkins & Will ultimately won the project, partnering with Clark Construction to create a winning design for the project. Ryan Bussard, Design Director for Perkins & Will’s Seattle and San Diego studios, says that winning the project and going through a few design iterations, the Pepper Canyon West project was paused in 2020 with the outbreak of COVID-19. Bussard says the team used this time to work on the design’s efficiency as it relates to UC’s overall goal of providing on-campus housing for students that is more affordable than off-campus housing in places like San Diego. For Bussard and his team, this meant maximizing the number of beds, which provided a challenge in designing apartment-
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csengineermag.com
Spring 2024
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