Industry News

The University of California, Merced,  will occupy a newly-completed 68,000, five-story office building—“University Square”—in Bakersfield. The Kern County Superintendent of Schools is also a tenant. Classrooms occupy the first two floors, with the upper floors housing support offices. An adjacent parking structure is also part of the project designed by Ware Malcomb of Irvine, Calif. The developer is The Allen Group. The general contractor was S.C. Anderson Inc. of Bakersfield.

EKC Technology Inc. has relocated its corporate headquarters to Danville from Hayward, Calif., allowing for an expansion of the company’s manufacturing and R&D operations at the recently-upgraded Hayward site. The new 11,000-sf headquarters houses sales, marketing, accounting, HR, and R&D. EKC, A ChemFirst Inc. company, has additional plants in Scotland and Japan and supplies the semiconductor industry with chemicals for wafer cleaning, surface preparation and residue removal. 

VeriSign, an Internet services company, plans to consolidate eight Northern Virginia offices at Waterview I, a 405,000-sf office building under construction in Herndon designed to accommodate 1,600 employees. Tishman Speyer Properties is developing the project, which is scheduled for completion in October 2001. VeriSign has an option on two as-yet-unbuilt structures—Waterview II and Waterview III—which will total 450,000 sf.

Principia College in Elsah, Ill., contracted Mackey Mitchell Associates to design the Watson Science Building addition. Originally designed by Bernard Maybeck in the 1930's, the 51,000-sf project followed green design principles. It includes faculty offices, classrooms and labs for 10 science departments, a 200-seat auditorium and a greenhouse.

Biovail Corp., a Mississauga, Ontario-based pharmaceutical company, has moved into its own 37,000-sf facility in the Southport Business Park in Morrisville on July 20. The company has nearly quadrupled its facility space as part of an expected company-wide expansion in the next two years. Biovail now develops and markets its own brand of pharmaceutical products.