Construction is nearing completion on the CITRIS headquarters building, with the official opening scheduled for February 27, 2009. The administrative hub for the multi-campus Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society will feature 141,000 square feet of space for research, faculty offices, a nanofabrication lab, a 149-seat auditorium and a cyber café. The building meets all the latest electrical and building codes for energy efficiency, and all student and public spaces are located on the ground level to increase accessibility and reduce the load on elevators. For more, go to http://www.coe.berkeley.edu/citris-opening.

Here’s a sneak preview:

NAME THAT MATERIAL

Nope, it’s not wood. It’s concrete. Glass-fiber reinforced concrete (GFRC) to be exact, a lightweight material that requires less steel to support than conventional concrete. More than 17,000 square feet of this super-strong, one-inch-thick skin cover the new edifice. Precast in rubber molds, it can be made to resemble anything—in this case, wooden planks to match the Craftsman feel of the neighboring Naval Architecture Building.

NO TWISTING ALLOWED

Those slanted beams you will see inside the new building are buckle-restraining brace frames (BRBFs), used in place of a concrete shear wall to absorb stress in the event of an earthquake. The Grecian-looking joints are attached to metal plates welded to the building’s frame and pinned at both ends to prevent lateral motion within two-thousandths of an inch tolerance.

In the Nanofabrication Laboratory, more than four miles of copper, steel and polymer pipes will transport 20 processed gasses—including compressed air, nitrogen, oxygen and argon—and other substances to support world-class research in nanoscale CMOS electronics, nanoelectromechanical systems (NEMS) and other technologies. The new lab will succeed the Berkeley Microlab, which opened in 1983 in Cory Hall.

By Megan Mansell Williams | Photo credit: Aaron Walburg photos