Arizona State University (ASU) has brought convenience and entertainment to downtown Tempe with the University Gateway Building. This new five-story building includes retail and restaurant spaces on the ground level, with academic spaces and classrooms on the upper levels. The building wraps around the Mill Avenue Parking Garage, another Henderson Engineers project. Both the new building and the parking garage use some of the same systems, so careful coordination across both projects and the surrounding campus was paramount.

Henderson provided building systems design services, as well as acoustical, and energy modeling. The project aimed for LEED Silver certification, and our team worked with the University and the design team to incorporate unique sustainable design elements such as daylight modeling and a high-performing building envelope. The building also contained several specialty classroom spaces like photo labs, video recording studios, and a floor dedicated to the University’s Arts and Music program that required high-performing acoustical design elements, impacting both the architectural and mechanical design.

The building systems were designed to serve the ventilation and exhaust needs of the lower level retail, and restaurant tenants, allowing for higher-performing systems to serve those spaces and reducing the overall energy usage for individual tenants. The mechanical plant room was located in the adjacent parking garage and tied into campus utilities, with provisions made for tie-in to a future ice storage central plant. This future plant, located below the garage, aligns with the University’s sustainability and capital improvement goals. Additionally, the building’s MEP systems were connected to ASU’s Energy Information System (EIS), which monitors energy consumption and generation across all their campuses in the Phoenix metro area.