The $63 million Price Center expansion is now up-and-running, adding more restaurants, a night club, more room to study and a grocery store to the heart of campus. A new indoor food court seats about 350 people and is surrounded by new restaurants, including Burger King, Santorini Island Grill, Bombay Coast and Tapioca Express, a boba tea specialty store. The new building will provide offices for the campus’ many student organizations, including the Associated Students. But perhaps the most anticipated part of the Price Center East is The Loft @ UCSD, a night club, restaurant and performance lounge, which opened its doors Sept. 25 and will host programs every night. The new Price Center expansion, known as the Price Center East, also offers 10,000 square feet of lounge space on several floors, a 4,500-foot, two-story ballroom with a built-in stage and a high-tech lights and sound system and a dance studio and rehearsal space, among other features.

The $44 million San Diego Supercomputer Center addition will be in full use during the fall quarter. Officials will dedicate the new building Oct. 14. The 80,000-square-foot space will double the size of the national science, engineering and technology center, adding needed room for trillions of bytes of data, powerful supercomputers and more than 400 professional multidisciplinary staff. The building extension marks SDSC’s 21st year and an era of expanded national leadership for the center. With the existing building and new extension, SDSC will have nearly five megawatts of power—enough wattage to light five thousand homes—to operate the center and its high-performance computing and data systems.

The $121 million North Campus housing project is scheduled to open by fall 2009. The new facility will house more than 1,000 transfer students. About 200 beds could be available as early as February, said Mark Cunningham, executive director of Housing, Dining and Hospitality. Another 400 would become available in July and another 450 by the end of August. The project will include a 14-story high rise as well as several three- and four-story buildings, a café and bookstore. Known as the Village at North Torrey Pines, the project is located just north of Eleanor Roosevelt College and across from the Rady School of Management. It also will be the first housing complex to offer a 12-month housing guarantee; other undergraduate projects offer nine months. The Village will eventually house about 1,800 students, once a second phase of construction is completed in fall 2010.

The Conrad Prebys Music Center is scheduled to open later this academic year in the heart of campus. The $53-million facility will include a 400-seat concert hall, a black-box theater, a 150-seat lecture and recital hall and a large courtyard that will double as a performance space. The center will become the home of UCSD’s music department, which will move in during Winter quarter. The facility will serve the university’s educational mission with recording and teaching studios, many practice rooms, a large rehearsal room for orchestra and state-of-the-art computer audio, video and networking technology. Opening concerts are scheduled for May 2009.

Construction of the Robert Paine Scripps Seaside Forum, a facility with state-of-the-art audio-visual capabilities, is set to open in early 2009. The modern meeting facility, which carries a $14.5 million price tag, will consist of a building complex with more than 12,000 assignable square feet of meeting and support space. The main building of the Scripps Seaside Forum will be an auditorium with flexible seating space for about 300 persons. Four freestanding meeting rooms, each with an ocean view, are adjacent to the auditorium and range in size to accommodate from 20 to 80 people. In addition to the state-of-the-art audio-visual capabilities, the facility will have a small restaurant with terrace seating and on-site catering facilities. The project is privately funded, with the majority of support coming from the children and grandchildren of Robert Paine Scripps, the son of Scripps Oceanography cofounder E.W. Scripps. Additional significant support was received from members of the Scripps Director's Cabinet, a group of advisors and supporters for Scripps Oceanography.

The $9 million Shiley Eye Center and Ratner Children’s Eye Center expansion also has opened its doors. The expansion project, which is fully funded by philanthropy, increases the centers’ existing clinical space by more than 50 percent and includes additional examination rooms, a registration area and a new waiting room on the first floor to offer added convenience to patients. The second floor contains space for new faculty and future research needs. The Ratner Children’s Eye Center also added several new examination rooms essentially doubling its clinical examination space. The total project adds approximately 13,000 square feet to the two facilities.

The $8.6 million annex to the Recreation and Intramural Athletic Complex is due for completion in August 2009. The building will include a sports and fitness-themed café, which will sell beer and wine. The space also will include a convenience store, a large meeting room, a Peet’s Coffee & Tea shop and terraced lounge spaces overlooking the playing field and exterior terraced patios.