On Downey Way en route to Taco Bell, a LEED Platinum certified, modern glass building is coming into shape – the Ginsburg Hall, the future home for USC Viterbi School of Engineering’s Computer Science Department.
Victoria Oge-Evans, a Green Technologies Masters student, toured the building last semester for her class in Sustainable Design and Construction. She recalls the feature that stood out to her being a sunken garden that “[helps] manage rainwater, which would be really helpful in reducing run-off that causes flooding when it rains heavily.”
LEED Platinum is the highest rating in the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design certification. Projects applying for the certification can earn points on different criteria related to sustainable designs and constructions. To be LEED Platinum certified, all parties must be unified around the concept of sustainable achievement - from designers to engineers, consultants to contractors, everyone is required to track and control the impact of the building on the environment.
The Ginsburg Hall project focused on three major points for LEED Platinum certification: “[the building’s] energy performance, the embodied carbon of the building, and also the sort of health and wellbeing - that indoor environmental quality credit,” Sean Quinn said, the Director of Regenerative Design at HOK, the company responsible for designing the Ginsburg Hall.
One unique feature built to facilitate better indoor environmental quality is the buffer facade. It is an indoor buffer that provides an outdoor experience, giving a chance for students to catch a breather in between vigorous researching and learning sessions. The outdoor experience is cleverly mimicked by taking exhausted air from laboratories as well as individual rooms and then recycling it into the buffer facade. This process generates natural ventilation, reducing the need for additional cooling.
The space invites students from different disciplines to interact and collaborate with one another and is designed to be “consistently available, consistently comfortable, and creates this sort of threshold of activity,” Quinn explained.
The sustainability effort does not stop at the construction of the building. Once the building is put into use, it enters the “Living Laboratory” stage, which provides learning opportunities for the university in the long term. Professor David Gerber, the leader of the process, introduces the concept of the Living Laboratory and its implementation through a “Digital Twin” in a statement to Annenberg Media:
“[Ginsburg Hall] will have a digital twin enabling researchers across many disciplines from architecture, to engineering, to computer science, to health to innovate through the use of data and AI. It is a Living Lab and a first for our campus community. It is a building that will learn and a building that help teach through a novel digital twin technology. It is a building that has been sustainably designed and engineered and one that will continue to share its lessons towards our [campus’s] sustainable future.”
Being a “first” in LEED Platinum Certification and a “first” in the Living Lab technology, the Ginsburg Hall will act as an example for all future buildings on campus as USC strides toward its 2028 sustainability plan.
“To achieve sustainable and regenerative outcomes is not merely a technical design solution. It requires intense collaboration and ultimately commitment,” Quinn said.
The building is envisioned not only as a versatile space for the Computer Science department but also as a catalyst for inspiring further research in sustainability across engineering and architecture.