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UCSF selects Suffolk, CO Architects for 261,000-square-foot Mission Bay education and dental center. The progressive design-build project will transform an existing life sciences building into a new home for the UCSF School of Dentistry and a shared education center for students across the health professions. Sept. 8, 2026 Key highlights. * The renovation will create a 261,117-square-foot facility combining dental clinics, classrooms, simulation labs, and collaborative spaces for multiple health disciplines. * A dedicated 60,000-square-foot education center will support interprofessional learning with technology-enabled classrooms and team-based environments. * The project leverages existing buildings to accelerate development, reduce costs, and enhance UCSF's capacity for clinical care and health education. * Early construction activities are underway to ensure progress while final design details are completed, utilizing a progressive design-build approach. * This initiative exemplifies innovative reuse of research infrastructure to meet evolving academic and healthcare needs efficiently. UC San Francisco has selected Suffolk and CO Architects to deliver a 261,117-square-foot renovation at its Mission Bay campus that will create a new home for the School of Dentistry and a shared education center for students in dentistry, medicine, nursing, pharmacy, and physical therapy. The project will transform the interior and portions of the exterior of 409 Illinois St., a former life sciences building UCSF acquired in 2025 as part of a two-building purchase adjacent to the Mission Bay campus. The university says adapting the existing structure rather than constructing a new building is expected to save about two years of construction time while reducing project costs, with renovation work expected to begin in 2026 and a completion date targeted for late 2029. "This project represents a defining opportunity for CO Architects to build upon our legacy of shaping the nation's leading academic health and research institutions. It reflects our clients' confidence in our ability to create transformative environments that inspire learning, accelerate discovery, and advance the future of healthcare. This project will integrate cutting-edge technologies, adaptable learning environments, and spaces that foster collaboration and innovation to establish a new benchmark for academic excellence." Education and clinical care will share the building. The renovated facility will include dental clinics, classrooms, student support areas, simulation and clinical-skills spaces, community areas, and building support functions. UCSF's project documents call for approximately 165,000 assignable square feet within the building. A roughly 60,000-square-foot education center will provide shared learning space for students from UCSF's five health professions. Plans include simulation and clinical-skills laboratories, technology-enabled classrooms, team-based learning environments, collaborative areas, faculty offices, dining, and gathering spaces. The shared environment is intended to expand interprofessional education by enabling students from different health disciplines to train together. UCSF says the facility has been envisioned for about a decade as a dedicated home for collaborative health-professions education. The School of Dentistry portion will include new clinical environments incorporating digital dentistry, integrated primary and specialty care, and team-based treatment models. The university also plans to increase its capacity to provide dental care to Bay Area patients. UCSF Dental Center currently records about 125,000 patient visits annually across 14 specialty clinics. The move will replace the School of Dentistry's existing 1979 facility with space designed around contemporary clinical, educational, and technology needs. Progressive design-build team selected. UCSF is delivering the project through a progressive design-build model, which brings the builder and architect into the planning process early to help develop the design while aligning scope, cost, constructability, and schedule. Why it matters. Large higher education projects are often framed around adding new square footage, but UCSF's Mission Bay project demonstrates another option for institutions facing substantial space needs: acquiring and adapting buildings whose underlying structure and location can support a new academic mission. In this case, reuse is expected to shorten the development timeline while giving UCSF enough space to rethink how dental education, patient care, simulation, and interdisciplinary health-professions training relate to one another. The progressive design-build approach adds another layer to that strategy by bringing design and construction decisions together early in a technically complex renovation. Suffolk and CO Architects will work as an integrated team with UCSF throughout planning and design. The firms say early construction input, technical reviews, design management, and sustainability expertise will be used to manage the complexity of combining clinical, educational, and collaborative uses in the renovated building. Advanced site preparation and make-ready work has also been authorized so that construction activities that don't depend on the building's final design can proceed while design work continues. Existing building offers an alternative to new construction. The Mission Bay project is notable not only for its size but for UCSF's decision to adapt an existing research building to meet major academic and clinical space needs. The university acquired 409 Illinois St. and an adjacent building at 499 Illinois St. in 2025. Together, the properties encompass more than 525,000 square feet on 3.6 acres and already comply with University of California seismic safety requirements. For UCSF, the acquisition created an opportunity to expand its Mission Bay campus without waiting for a ground-up project. It also enables the university to bring dental education, clinical care, research, and broader health-professions instruction closer together within a campus already centered on research and patient care. This piece was created with the help of generative AI tools and edited by its content team for clarity and accuracy. Try AS&U word play. Take a break and play its game: Use your vocabulary skills to uncover this week's 5-letter word commonly used in education. New word every Monday!

AECtech+ 2026 | Boston. AECtech Boston 2026 was the 2nd Boston event hosted by Thornton Tomasetti | CORE studio, in partnership with CBT Architects, Perkins & Will, Suffolk Construction, and Speckle. This year saw an expanded program with an AI in AEC Panel discussion and Happy Hour hosted by Speckle at Suffolk's Headquarters. SPECKLE Happy Hour & AI Panel. The event kicked off with an evening AI Panel and Happy Hour on Thursday, August 20th. The evening featured candid conversations on one of the industry's most pressing questions about AI, from the perspective of leaders across AECO and a panel of representatives from the Technology space. Workshops. A practical guide to MCP & multi-agent workflows. Agentic AI and MCPs are all the rage these days, but it can be difficult to separate hype from substance. If you'd like to learn about these emerging technologies but aren't sure where to start, join its full-day workshop for a step-by-step, beginner-friendly, and AEC-focused walkthrough of the latest AI protocols. You will learn what Model Context Protocol is, how it works, and how to build your own MCP servers to help automate various design workflows. AEC Tech will also take a look at MCP features within the latest release of the Swiftlet Grasshopper plugin, which will let AEC Tech interact with a Rhino model using an LLM. From there, AEC Tech will explore AI agents, how to easily build them using open-source frameworks, and how to let multiple agents collaborate with each other via the A2A (Agent to Agent) protocol. Senior associate applications engineer. Collaborative vibe coding for AEC. This is a fun, collaborative vibe-coding workshop focused on how teams can rapidly develop toward a shared goal. Rather than treating "one-shotting" an app as a solitary exercise, the workshop will show how designers, technologists, and subject-matter experts can work together to frame a problem, define scope, contribute domain knowledge, test assumptions, and refine a working prototype. Participants will leave with a practical framework they can bring back to their firms to make vibe coding more collaborative, engaging, and useful. No coding background necessary, just a laptop with a browser and curiosity. You'll learn to use AI to write code, use GitHub to collaborate with your team (branches, pull requests, merge conflicts and all), and build small AEC-flavored apps - a 3D viewer, a markup tool, and/or a data dashboard. You'll walk out ready for the next day's hackathon, and the resources and knowledge needed to run this exact workshop back at your own firm.