The University of Texas at Austin, Engineering Education and Research Center: A global innovation hub

Jacobs, as the prime architect and engineer, led a team of consultants that programmed and designed multiple new and renovated facilities at The University of Texas at Austin.

The buildings are central to achieving the Cockrell School of Engineering’s vision to become a global center for technology innovation, engineering education, and entrepreneurship.

The Cockrell School of Engineering (CSE) engaged the Jacobs team to update the CSE Master Plan in response to an initiative to add1,000 undergraduate students. In parallel, we completed a formation study/program for multiple new buildings(including EERC and EEB).

The study and preprogramming exercise concluded that the CSE could achieve the desired synergies between faculty, staff, researchers, and students by housing the departments in an improved district of interdisciplinary buildings.

Criteria included cost with escalation contingencies and campus vs. commercial standard opportunities; overall design and construction schedule; swing spacetime; space and cost requirements; UT Campus Master Plan compliance; site constructability including staging/lay-down space challenges; and utility relocation and connection capacity/availability issues.

Jacobs engaged in a thorough process to coordinate site utilities to accommodate the proposed multiple building(s). We assisted the University with relocating and enhancing existing service utility lines to the campus quadrant. This included re-routing high-pressure,20-inch gas lines which served the entire north campus as well as the City of Austin; the City of Austin copper telecom mainlines; and water lines which included extending and rebuilding the campus-owned fire loop.

Because the site is located on an operating campus, we took special consideration to minimize disruptive activities in a very scaled and planned manner. In addition, we relocated and re-built more than 20,000 square feet of temporary building structures on-site in various locations and phases.

The new EERC is an iconic building that has become the core of the entire UT Engineering precinct, designed to inspire interaction and collaboration between students, faculty, and staff and to maximize the visibility of teaching and research.

The project is conceived as two nine-story limestone and glass towers connected by an enclosed public ‘Commons’ on the lower three floors.

Located at the very center of the EERC, the Commons is a vital and active public space that collects multiple entry points at varying levels of the building and provides visible frontage for the most public aspects of the building program, such as the Interdisciplinary Project Labs, the café, the library, the auditorium, and the student organizations. The Commons creates a sense of community and identity for the Cockrell School.

Programmed space in the EERC project includes interdisciplinary research and teaching laboratories, Electrical and Computer Engineering(ECE) research and teaching laboratories, undergraduate and graduate collaboration spaces, ECE administrative office suites, ECE faculty offices, student support, and outreach space, meeting and conference rooms, lounges and break rooms, distance learning classrooms, a 300-seat auditorium with five multipurpose break-out rooms, grand atrium, library, café,2,500-square-foot Center for Innovation, a teaching clean room, low vibration labs and a 5,000-gross-square-foot mission-critical network operations center.

In 2019, the EERC Atrium received a National Award from the American Institute of Steel Construction (AISC) as part of its 2019 Innovative Design in Engineering and Architecture with Structural Steel awards program (IDEAS².)