Laboratory & Life Sciences
BioScience LA — Courthouse Adaptive Reuse Design-Build
Design-build adaptive reuse of a courthouse into a life sciences incubator.
Client
LA County Internal Services Department
Location
Culver City, CA
Service Line
A 1956 courthouse reborn as a bioscience lab — Athena as design-build prime, self-performing the mechanical and controls and managing every trade, through COVID.
The old Culver City Courthouse, a 21,568-square-foot building from 1956 at 4130 Overland, has a new life: it’s now BioScience LA, a hub built to grow Los Angeles County’s life-sciences industry. Athena led the conversion as design-build prime contractor for the County’s Internal Services Department, taking a mid-century courthouse and delivering it turnkey as modern lab and office space.
Athena was the full general contractor and prime. We self-performed the mechanical HVAC and the building automation, and we managed every other trade through completion: electrical, plumbing, fire alarm, fire sprinkler, and the full tenant improvement, from architectural and structural to civil and landscape, along with hazardous-material abatement and finishes. The roughly $5.5 million project ran across three separate job-order contracts on an accelerated schedule.
On the mechanical side, we replaced the building’s HVAC with an LG heat-recovery VRF system: a penthouse condensing unit feeding ceiling-cassette fan coils throughout, with branch controllers that let it heat some rooms while cooling others at the same time. In a building that mixes labs, offices, and meeting rooms, that simultaneous heating and cooling is exactly the right tool, and air handlers bring in the ventilation air. For controls, we installed a Schneider Electric EcoStruxure platform connected to Niagara, with the VRF integrated through its own controller, an open system the County can keep building on as the labs grow.
All of it came together during COVID, under every restriction the pandemic put on a job site, and still reached a 2021 ribbon-cutting. Turning a 65-year-old courthouse into a working bioscience building is hard in a normal year. We did it in one that was anything but.
Client: Los Angeles County Internal Services Department (ISD). Architect: H.H. Fremer Architects (Harold Fremer). Mechanical Engineer of Record: P2S Engineering. Delivery: design-build, prime, across three job-order contracts (JOC); ~$5.5M. Athena role: general contractor and prime — self-performed mechanical HVAC (LG heat-recovery VRF) and building automation (Schneider Electric EcoStruxure connected to Niagara), and managed all trades. Ribbon-cutting 2021. Photography courtesy of H.H. Fremer Architects.
Another project for LA County ISD: Internal Services Department HQ coil replacement.
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