The first phase of the Aggie Square campus transforms a surface parking lot into a dense, urban innovation district. Designed to bring the city, students, university, and industry together, this development model attracts private companies to lease space on university land, creating a hub that pushes the boundaries of innovation. Strong integration with the surrounding community is achieved through key access points and site amenities. 

Sited on 8.25 acres, Phase 1 of Aggie Square is bordered by residential neighborhoods and the UC Davis medical campus. At its center, the namesake Aggie Square is a ¾-acre plaza that serves as an outdoor room, connected by a tree-lined paseo. The development delivers 594,500 SF across two buildings—200 Aggie Square for research and 300 Aggie Square for office and classroom uses—unified by a community-serving ground floor. The ground floor is open to the public in all directions, inviting the community into light-filled spaces for learning, making, and gathering.

One Building Fits All

Aggie Square is designed as a connected ecosystem where physical space actively accelerates collaboration. By linking public ground floors, visible maker spaces, education zones, and open vertical connections, the district is designed to be a hive of activity. These “active invites” foster serendipitous encounters among students, researchers, industry partners, and the public. The result is an environment where collaboration happens more naturally, authentically, and at scale.

Across its seven floors, Aggie Square’s vertical stacking creates a clear continuum from the most public, community-facing spaces at the ground plane to increasingly specialized medical education and research environments above. Maker spaces and public-facing spaces anchor the entry level, giving way to co-working labs and teaching spaces on the second floor. Higher levels transition into UC Davis’s wet labs, support zones, and shared cores, followed by medical education spaces on the fifth floor. The lab spaces on the sixth and seventh floors are carefully planned to bring an abundance of daylight in wherever possible. This level of integration transforms the building from a collection of programs into a living ecosystem—one that supports the full arc of learning, research, and community engagement within a single, navigable framework.

The first two floors of Aggie Square operate as a unified public realm, linking the lab and office buildings to create a connected experience. Across these levels, a mix of classrooms, a maker space, community-facing programs, and event space fosters collaboration, activation, and an inviting sense of openness.

Located at Aggie Square’s front door, the ground-floor maker space puts science on display, with 3D printers, laser cutters, and fabrication tools visible from the lobby and primary circulation corridors. A long, glass-lined passage along the lab building showcases ongoing activity—from prototyping to the creation of specialized veterinary training models—offering students, tenants, and visitors a vivid glimpse into the innovation happening within the district.

A LIVING ROOM FOR LIFE SCIENCES

The interior environments are fundamental to how academia, industry, and community gather at Aggie Square. Guided by principles of hospitality, openness, and cross-pollination, the design reimagines the research campus as a place defined not by institutional thresholds but by warmth, texture, and movement. Across the district, interiors invite users into spaces that encourage connection, foster creativity, and make the processes of scientific discovery visible and accessible.

Light-filled ground floors open in all directions, forming a porous public realm anchored by warm woods, exposed structural concrete, and regionally sourced brick. Artworks by local artists and a diverse, playful mix of furnishings establish a vibrant, textural palette rooted in Sacramento’s cultural fabric. Monumental stairs and open vertical connections form the social spine of Aggie Square, linking key floors to encourage circulation, collaboration, and a sense of shared ownership. These elements create active gathering spaces that welcome neighbors, students, and faculty into the life of the district.

A Home for Research

Shared amenity knuckles dissolve the boundaries between university researchers and industry innovators—placing kitchens, conference rooms, and circulation at the crossroads where their paths intersect. This intentional overlap becomes the keystone of the innovation ecosystem: a design strategy that sparks chance encounters, accelerates collaboration, and fuels breakthrough discovery.

Strategically placed shared kitchens, lounges, and collaboration zones at elevator landings and within lab neighborhoods further activate these nodes, creating natural moments of cross-pollination between research groups, students, community members, and industry partners. By placing academic researchers and private industry on the same floor with shared amenity and collaboration spaces, the design breaks down traditional silos to drive real-world impact.

Because Aggie Square serves tenants ranging from biotech startups to university wet-lab researchers and the UC Davis School of Medicine, the lab design prioritizes adaptability to ensure each group can thrive. Strategic lab planning concepts such as side-loaded cores, shared-cores, and planning for flexibility and future proofing ensure 200 Aggie Square has been designed to support a wide range of laboratory programs and layouts.

The lab floor plan illustrates the flexible neighborhood planning concept, which can accommodate many different types of research such as biology, physics, chemistry or computational science. This perimeter layout also allows for a more efficient mechanical system, with cascading air from write-up spaces into labs, resulting in reduced make-up air loads.

Designed to Reflect Local Character

Rooted in Sacramento’s historic character, the design takes inspiration from the city’s red brick architecture, tree-lined streets, and porch culture to create a welcoming, walkable district. From masonry manufactured locally to artwork by community artists, the design reflects Sacramento’s cultural identity and UC Davis’s connection to place and community.

The masonry work—crafted locally from Sacramento red clay—was designed with a bespoke profile, using a standard mix shaped through a custom die to create textured edges and a distinct identity for the buildings. Its use roots the project in the city’s masonry tradition, drawing a connection to Sacramento’s historic brick structures. H.C. Muddox, who has been producing brick locally for 145 years, extruded, baked, and flashed the material just nine miles from the project site.