As part of an ongoing initiative to improve infrastructure and facilities across Alamo College’s campuses, Alamo Colleges awarded Vaughn several projects at San Antonio College, including the newly completed Early Childhood Education Center and Fletcher Building Renovation projects. Most recently, our team completed the new Science Building project. This 20,000 SF facility houses San Antonio College’s biology and nursing program, which aims to boost workforce training for San Antonio’s biotech sector.
In addition, the single-story building provides laboratory space to support increased class sizes in general biology, microbiology, anatomy, and physiology courses. The facility is located next to San Antonio College’s nursing building on the southeast side of campus.
With seven laboratory spaces, all outfitted with new equipment and fume hoods, the new Science Building will help San Antonio College provide its students with a more up-to-date experience. The building also features a learning area with a trellis, hammock posts, limestone benches, and a fabric shade structure.
The Science Building is tailor-made to meet SAC's needs, but our team overcame several challenges to get it to this point. Out of all the procurement delays our team faced on this project, one item stood out: the building’s two custom air handler units (AHUs). Facing an extreme delay on the units’ electric motors, the AHU manufacturer was able to provide alternate fan motors, allowing the project to stay on track for the spring semester opening.
“Our team was diligent in the procurement effort, which allowed us to realize the delay early on enough that we were able to implement a temporary AHU to condition the building as we started finishes,” the project manager explained. “There was quite a bit of strategic foresight and coordination on the field side involved with placing the temporary AHU to allow the permanent AHU’s to be set and installed while keeping the temporary unit running at all times. Our folks did a great job.”
The nearby Women’s Empowerment Center presented another challenge. To complete our work, we needed to schedule service outages, most of which would directly impact the Center. We wanted to ensure we would not affect day-to-day operations at this building, so we carefully coordinated any outages with the end users and completed work on weekends to avoid impacting the Center.
Our team carried this same attention to San Antonio College’s needs throughout the entire project. The new Science Building will support San Antonio College’s STEM endeavors for years to come, and we look forward to supporting the Alamo Colleges District on future projects.