138: Seismic Retrofit | Walker Hall Graduate Student Center

In this episode, Cherise is joined by Ryan Jang, AIA, Principal at Leddy Maytum Stacy Architects in San Francisco, California. They discuss the Walker Hall Graduate Student Center at the University of California, Davis .

Walker Hall at UC Davis is a striking example of adaptive reuse, transforming a vacant 1927 agricultural engineering building into a vibrant center for graduate and professional students. Once seismically unsafe and underused, the 34,000 square foot structure now anchors the campus core as a hub for learning, collaboration, and community.

Ryan Jang, AIA, LEED AP | Principal | Leddy Maytum Stacy Architects

Ryan Jang, AIA, LEED AP, is a Principal at LEDDY MAYTUM STACY Architects in San Francisco, and the recipient of the 2022 AIA National Young Architect Award.

He specializes in diverse building types, primarily learning environments and higher education, but also affordable multifamily housing and civic and adaptive reuse projects.

His passion for working with clients and meaningfully understanding their values allows him to facilitate an inclusive design process in pursuit of collaborative and uplifting architecture.

His buildings strive to be an exuberant expression of the communities they serve and sensitively responsive to their cultural and environmental context.

Ryanâs projects have been recognized with multiple local and national design awards and he has been an invited speaker at several conferences and design juries.

He is a registered Architect in California, a LEED accredited professional and received a Bachelor of Architecture from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo.

Project Name and Location: Walker Hall Graduate Student Center, University of California, Davis

Walker Hall is an adaptive reuse of a vacant, seismically unsafe agricultural engineering building built in 1927, located at the historic core of the UC Davis campus. The project transformed the existing 34,000 square foot building into a graduate and professional student center with meeting rooms, a lecture hall, and sophisticated active-learning classrooms.

The revitalized Walker Hall provides a new Graduate Student Center that promotes interdisciplinary interactions and builds community for UC Davis graduate students and postdoctoral scholars. It supports graduate student success by providing a variety of spaces for formal and informal gathering, as well as mentoring, advising, and mental health counselling.

The three former machine shop wings were repurposed as a two-hundred-seat lecture hall and two large active learning classrooms. Facing southward onto a new Walker Promenade, these flexible, media-rich spaces are available to classes from across the university. Their transparency reveals the hum of academic activity within and enlivens the pedestrian experience at the campus core.

The educational program extends outdoors to two landscaped courtyards framed by new sculptural canopies that serve as thresholds to the new Graduate Center and provide shelter from extreme weather.

With a full seismic retrofit and new energy-efficient systems, Walker Hall illustrates the importance of adaptive reuse and deep energy retrofit to the resilience of university campus settings.

New exterior details, including steel sunshades, cylindrical daylight collectors, a sculptural steel stair, and geometrically folded shade canopies, serve important functional goals and speak to the industrial history of the building.

Enhanced thermal performance and high-efficiency building systems, combined with dedicated renewable energy provided by an on-campus solar farm, will result in a zero net electricity building.

Starting with an original University project goal of LEED Gold certification, the project successfully deployed a variety of simple sustainable strategies to achieve LEED Platinum certification at no additional project cost.

Project Team List:

Owner: University of California, Davis
Structural: Forell Elsesser
Civil: BKF
MEP: Arup
Security/Low Voltage/Acoustical: Charles Salter
AV: Shalleck Collaborative
Lighting: ALD (retired)
Landscape: OCB
Cost Estimating: TBD Consultants
General Contractor: Soltek
Specifications: Stansen Specs

Photo Credits:
Project Photography: Bruce Damonte, Richard Barnes
Historic photos â credit: UC Davis
Pre-Renovation Photos: Courtesy of Leddy Maytum Stacy