Murrieta’s 34,000-square-foot City Hall was designed by FPBA in the City’s new town square, which shares common pedestrian space with the library, police station, senior center and amphitheater pavilion. It brings a welcoming environment for the city administration and elected officials to interact with the citizens of Murrieta. The iconic Clock Tower and craftsman-style design incorporates a modern tilt-up building with the quality and scale appropriate for the site and the immediate adjacent architecture. The new City Hall consists of two-story office space, a 130-seat city council chamber, public meeting spaces and a public services counter.
For the Elephant Odyssey Exhibit on 7.5 acres, FPBA worked to integrate four Asian elephants from the San Diego Zoo Safari Park with the San Diego Zoo’s three African elephants to the newly designed space. This provided a perfect opportunity to replace the outdated elephant habitat as well as over 9 acres of other aging exhibits in the center of the Zoo. The resulting redevelopment was the Zoo’s largest single project in its history touching over 30 separate species in 21 individual structures. The redevelopment includes updates and expansions to primary utilities, demolition of nine aged exhibits, mass grading of the entire site (over 8 acres), construction of major roads and retaining walls and mitigation of hazardous materials prior to demolition. The range of exhibits and accommodations, delivered as a single design and construction project, represents many individual projects, each requiring individual programming and interface with separate curators, keepers and stakeholders.
The “Flexible by Design” program for Texas A&M University’s new 156,000-square-foot facility revolutionizes the production of vaccines and critical medical therapies. Encompassing academic, research and development activities under one roof with areas and functions to promote collaboration and cross fertilization of ideas, it is the “first-in-class” facility to potentially create vast opportunities in the biopharmaceutical industry and for the state of Texas. It has become an international destination for research and application of new technologies for the development of medications to combat diseases and serves as a model for future strategic national efforts to protect humanity from bio-terror threats and attacks.
The LEED Platinum UCI Alumni Center establishes a presence that extends far beyond the borders of the campus to generate an economical, educational, and cultural bridge to the world. FPBA weaved this ideology into the design, and through a meticulous and collaborative process, the team yielded a facility embodying a balance of progressive architecture, sustainable design, and thoughtful campus integration with maximized program efficiencies. An elegant and welcoming folded glass plane at the entry envelops and ties together the compositional form of the building and announces itself as the entry to campus, creating a prominent doorway easily discernible to visitors and establishing a welcoming environment on the campus to students and alumni. Strong connections and seamless transitions to the natural environment create free-flowing spaces and an atmosphere of celebration. The nature of the facility and the location of the site dictate the form of the building, and the resulting design takes on that of an iconic marker.
Significant exterior and interior upgrades were designed by FPBA to BioMed Realty Trust’s newest acquisition, a 1980s vintage building located in La Jolla, California. The 68,000 SF building, previously converted from defense contractor use to now dated wet labs, was completely renovated to include four newly upgraded laboratory spaces designed to take maximum advantage of both natural light as well as the landscaped views outdoors. Reconfigured laboratory suites that have highly visual individual entrance lobbies respond to a variety of tenant needs to allow for maximum flexibility as end-user requirements evolve. The new Conference Center with contemporary audio visual capabilities is expandable to the exterior where outside meeting and gathering areas are carefully integrated with new landscape and site enhancements. The building’s exterior areas cultivate gathering spaces that were designed as direct extensions of the interior upgrades, with new canopies visually expanding from the base building. The new technology-based fitness center provides tenants a welcome opportunity to enjoy physical activities away from their desk at any time during the day.
