Project Feature: UC Riverside, Undergraduate Teaching and Learning Facility

Project Summary

Location: Riverside, CA (UC Riverside campus) 

Dates of Service: 2024 - Current 

Services Performed: Whole-Building Commissioning, Title-24 Acceptance Testing, LEED Fundamental and Enhanced Commissioning, Monitoring-Based Commissioning (MBCx) 

Number of Buildings: 1 

Square Feet: ~120,000 GSF, including approximately 100,700 SF of academic space, four floors 

Systems Commissioned: MEP Systems, Lab Air Handling Units, Laboratory Exhaust and Fume Hoods, Domestic Hot Water, Low Voltage, BMS, Lab equipment, Solar PV, Irrigation, CDA, Vacuum, RODI 

Space Types: General Assignment Classrooms, Lecture Halls, Biology and Chemistry Teaching Labs, Dance Studio, Reading Room 

A Teaching and Laboratory Building on the UCR East Campus

The Undergraduate Teaching and Learning Facility (UTLF) sits at the eastern terminus of the University Avenue and Canyon Crest Drive intersection, within the UC Riverside East Campus. The building is four stories and roughly 120,000 gross square feet, of which about 100,700 square feet is academic space seating close to 1,700 students. The program includes 19 mid- to small-sized classrooms, two auditorium-style lecture halls, six biology labs, four chemistry labs, a 6,000 square foot dance studio with an outdoor performance area, and a top-floor reading room. More than 10,500 cubic yards of Type IL portland limestone concrete were placed and left exposed on every elevation. Three colleges share the building: the College of Natural and Agricultural Sciences, the College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, and the Bourns College of Engineering. 

The UC Regents approved the $156.3 million project in March 2024, and McCarthy Building Companies broke ground that October under a design-build delivery. Steinberg Hart is the architect and Affiliated Engineers, Inc. (AEI) is the engineer of record. GMC Cx is the commissioning authority under contract to McCarthy, carrying the LEED v4 BD+C Fundamental Commissioning and Verification and Enhanced Commissioning credits, the Title 24 acceptance review, and Monitoring-Based Commissioning under Enhanced Commissioning Option 1, Path 2. 

What Commissioning Meant on This Project

The commissioned scope spanned five divisions. Division 11 covered the fume hoods, autoclaves, and glasswashers. Division 22 covered domestic and industrial hot and cold water, the high-purity RO/DI system, lab compressed air, lab vacuum, waste neutralization, and the safety showers and eyewashes. Division 23 covered the BMS, chilled water distribution, the heating hot water heat exchanger and pumps, the air handling units, the DOAS unit, air distribution, lab exhaust, VAV boxes, laboratory air valves, and hydronic fan coils. Division 26 covered electrical distribution and metering, interior and exterior lighting, the solar PV system, battery energy storage, the organic chemical storage UPS, and the integrated systems test. Division 32 covered irrigation. 

Neither thermal utility is generated in the building. Chilled water comes off the campus loop through a local booster system, and heating hot water comes from campus steam through a heat exchanger and distribution pumps, so the water-side work covered the campus interface and the building distribution rather than a plant. The air handling units are 100 percent outside air with economizers. Terminal equipment is VAV boxes, VAV boxes with reheat coils, hydronic fan coils, and laboratory air valves in supply, exhaust, general exhaust, and fume exhaust configurations, with room pressurization held by airflow offset. The building automation system is an Automated Logic WebCTRL installation. 

The design review was performed at the 90 percent construction document milestone, with the Title 24 acceptance review at 95 percent.  

Commissioning followed ASHRAE Guideline 0-2019 and Specification Section 01 91 13. Pre-functional checklists were executed with the sample rate set by consequence rather than applied uniformly: 100 percent on the fume hoods, autoclaves, and glasswashers, 100 percent on utility generation equipment and on the lab and critical air handlers. TAB verification was sampled at 100 percent in the labs and 20 percent in the office areas, covering fume hood face velocity, hydronic flows, grille and diffuser airflows, airflow measurement stations, and room pressure and directional airflow. 

Functional testing ran in a fixed order. Contractor point-to-point checkout and TAB came first, then documentation review, then TAB verification against the submitted TAB report, then equipment level functional tests followed by system level tests. A second round of TAB verification followed for the room pressurization scope, then the automated tests described below, a 7 to 14 day performance period, the fume hood certifications, and finally the integrated systems test. That last test simulates a utility outage and verifies the generators, transfer switches, UPS units, and distribution, along with the connected plug, process, HVAC, egress lighting, and fire alarm loads through the transition to and from utility power. 

Fume hood certification was performed to ASHRAE 110, with the face velocity test run against Cal/OSHA 8 CCR 5154.1, Ventilation Requirements for Laboratory-Type Hood Operations, which requires an average face velocity of at least 100 feet per minute with no point below 70 fpm. The hoods are controlled to an effective setpoint at or above 100 FPM, reducing to 60 FPM on vacancy through local presence sensing. At an 18" operating sash height a 6-foot hood presents 9 sq.ft. of open area, so the design volume is (9 sq.ft. x 100 FPM) = 900 CFM. Verification covered face velocity across the sash travel, tracking between the supply and exhaust air valves, and the room-to-corridor directional airflow that the offset control holds. 

Monitoring-Based Commissioning with SkySpark

Commissioning ends at turnover. Monitoring-Based Commissioning (MBCx) does not. On UTLF, GMC Cx runs our SkySpark analytics platform against the WebCTRL data, which satisfies the monitoring-based path under LEED Enhanced Commissioning and gives the facilities group a continuing record of how the building operates. Two criteria carried into the performance period. The building is to hold between 0.00 and 0.08 inches w.g. for more than 95 percent of the period, and stable operation is confirmed across a 14-day performance period before systems are accepted. 

Trending. SkySpark collects and stores point data continuously, so performance is reviewed across days, weeks, and quarters rather than from a single snapshot. Trends cover discharge air temperature and duct static against setpoint, lab exhaust turndown between class sessions, solar PV output alongside building consumption through the electrical meters, and the campus chilled water and steam interface. 

Fault Detection. Analytics rules run against the live data and flag conditions without anyone looking for them: simultaneous heating and cooling, valves hunting or stuck open, sensors reading outside calibration or reading flat, and equipment short cycling. During functional testing this surfaced chilled water valve hunting on three of the air handling units and airflow tracking errors on seven exhaust valves. Both were logged and corrected. 

Troubleshooting. The same supervisory connection used to read the building is also used to test it. AutoCx uses SkySpark's supervisory control to override BMS setpoints and occupancy points at the equipment level and execute functional test scripts automatically. That is how the VAV boxes, laboratory air valves, and fan coil units were tested at 100 percent rather than on the 5 to 10 percent sample ASHRAE Guideline 0 contemplates. When a rule fires afterward, the trend data is already in hand, so the cause is identified and handed to the facilities staff as a specific piece of equipment and sequence rather than as a comfort complaint. 

Why It Matters

UTLF went from groundbreaking in October 2024 to substantial completion in summer 2026, carrying ten wet teaching labs, 19 classrooms, and two lecture halls. Ninety-six issues were identified and tracked across that period, and the systems holding containment at the fume hoods and pressure in the labs were verified by test rather than accepted on startup. The MBCx scope continues past turnover through opposite-season functional testing three to six months after the initial tests, the ten-month in-warranty review, and a year of monthly optimization.