Just over a year after it broke ground, the structural work on the first stage of Aggie Square is done.
On Thursday morning, the University of California Davis, the city of Sacramento and developer Wexford Science & Technology celebrated the topping off of what will be the first two buildings in the $1.1 billion, 1.2 million-square-foot biotechnology center just south of UC Davis’ hospital campus in Sacramento.
"We’ve largely come to the completion of the first couple of buildings, which means the Aggie Square vision is now turning into physical reality," said UC Davis Chancellor Gary May.
The two buildings comprise a total of 728,030 square feet. The first, which will be dedicated to wet lab and research space, is connected to the second — the “Lifelong Learning” building, which will be dedicated to classrooms and public programming — by the ground floor and second story lobby and gallery space. A parking garage is also being built to the east of the two buildings.
“We anticipate finishing off these two and getting the other couple of buildings done and opening the doors in early 2025,” May said. “It’s become real now. It’s not just me talking about it.”
Tom Osha, executive vice president of Baltimore-based Wexford, said the other projects in this first phase of Aggie Square will be a second life sciences building for lab research, the completion of the outdoor plazas that bookend the development, and a mixed-use residential building.
"The beauty is the building is on schedule and it is on budget," Osha said. "In this day and age, that’s always something to celebrate."
Osha said the topping out comes 14 months, almost to the day, after the groundbreaking.
"The building is poured concrete, so it has been able to go very quickly," Osha said. "Today symbolizes the end of the structural portion, and now we move to things like the glass on the outside, and then the framing and all of the work that will be done inside."
This milestone also means that Wexford will begin seriously looking for companies to fill the portion of the building that UC Davis isn’t occupying.
“Usually a building needs to get to about here before the real leasing begins,” Osha said. “It’s just a dynamic of the industry, that people want to see it before they commit to it.”
One thing that will be in the building is Connect Labs by Wexford, a lab and office space for small startups, that will be able to hold 30 to 50 companies. The rest of the space will be configured based on which companies want to move in — whether they want 5,000 square feet or a full floor of the building.
“Companies will pick here because of what they can do with the university and in the ecosystem,” Osha said.
