UC San Diego, Epstein Family Amphitheater

overview

The Epstein Family Amphitheater, a state-of-the-art outdoor entertainment venue at UC San Diego, hosts a wide variety of events for the university’s nationally ranked theatre, dance, visual arts and music programs. Despite its intimate feel, the venue holds nearly 2,850 people, with two bowl seating sections and a large, steeply sloped lawn.

We provided structural design services to Safdie Rabines Architects for the permanent amphitheater, which includes a stage covered by a 46-foot-tall, ETFE-clad, diagrid steel shell and concrete back-of-house facilities. The project also includes 3,000 square feet of subterranean concrete restroom facilities, a 400-square-foot ticketing and vending building, 98,000 square feet of landscape and approximately 85,000 square feet of improvements to the current parking lot and other site features.

highlights

• The architecture features multiple elements with highly complex geometries, including a curved, audience-facing wall with vertical tilt and varying top height, a rounded structural roof slab supporting a vegetated roof and the diagrid structure itself.
• To satisfy the architectural goal of a light, airy shell protruding from a concrete wall, our engineers designed a spherical concrete flat plate at the concrete back-of-house structure to support the steel shell ribs protruding from the concrete face. Alternative detailing practices allowed for the wall to be placed without visible joints at the roof line, resulting in a stage that appears delicately balanced by the monolithic walls.
• Using steel in the stage shell offered the most structurally efficient solution to maintain maximum flexibility. Our structural engineering solutions conceal many of the complex and critical connection elements, allowing the architecture to blend seamlessly with its surroundings.
• We leveraged software developed in house to quickly iterate geometrical changes while keeping both Revit and analytical models in sync, providing real-time feedback on structural implications from architectural updates.