Mesa College Continuing Education Center
San Diego, CA
This LEED Silver facility employs natural cooling and lighting strategies to surpass California’s stringent energy efficiency requirements by 43%.
Awarded ENR California’s Best Higher Ed/Research Project (2013), the Continuing Education Center includes classrooms and offices for five programs, an art lab, a professional-grade teaching kitchen, and a reconfigurable multipurpose room. The parent-child education space opens directly onto private exterior playground and garden, and custom casework units in classrooms increase storage capacity for traveling teachers.
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By designing and developing this project fully in Revit, SGPA reduced the client’s expected 7% change order rate to below 4%. Sustainable elements include a passive cooling system harnessing the ocean breeze to create a negative-pressured, double-storied corridor that draws air from each space. In addition, each classroom teacher may choose between mechanical or passive cooling with a simple on/off switch. By design abundant daylight triggers electric lighting system to switch off automatically. Plan projections also prevent heat gain and increase daylighting by serving simultaneously as sunshades and light shelves.
