UC San Diego Theatre District Living and Learning Neighborhood

The Theatre District Living and Learning Neighborhood turned a 10-acre surface parking lot at UC San Diego into a mixed-use campus neighborhood — five residential towers holding more than 2,000 student beds across 1.4 million square feet, with retail, dining and academic space at grade. HKS and EYRC Architects shaped the buildings around the site's climate: a sawtooth facade, tuned with computational fluid dynamic modeling, draws ocean breezes into the student rooms and improves airflow by 30% while cutting solar heat gain. FDR Engineers provided the cold-formed steel engineering, the design of the prefinished exterior wall panels that carry that geometry, and the exterior cladding design, working with panel fabricator Kapture Prefab. The neighborhood received the 2026 National AIA Housing Award in the Specialized Housing category.

FDR Scope

Cold-formed steel engineering, design of the prefinished exterior wall panel system, and exterior cladding design.

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