Millbrae Recreation Center

Photo Credit: ELS Architects

In 2016, the City of Millbrae tragically lost its Recreation Center to arson. The original 1960’s structure was a central meeting point for community groups and hosted popular youth summer camps, child-care programs and senior citizen classes. The community immediately began fundraising and planning for the construction of a new recreation center.

The resulting building, nearly 8,000 sq. ft. larger than its predecessor, achieved the city’s goal of providing a flexible facility that would serve as a hub for the community, while also introducing several unique innovations that make the new recreation center more sustainable and energy efficient. It features a fitness center, many multipurpose meeting spaces, a commercial-grade kitchen and outdoor play area. The building is all-electric, powered by solar panels on the roof, and designed to meet Net-Zero emissions standards. And it is one of the first projects in the San Francisco Bay Area to use a combination of Cross-Laminated Timber (CLT) and structural steel, which reduced the building’s carbon footprint and also allowed the project team to deliver the building more quickly.

Making the Shift to Design-Build

The new Millbrae Recreation Center started off as a traditional design/bid/build project. But by 2019, the project was 15% over budget, and the city was facing a 4-year process to deliver the finished building. At this point, Millbrae retained Swinerton Management & Consulting as its Owner Advisor to reimagine the project as a collaborative design-build process. Changing to a collaborative design-build delivery process – even at the mid-point of design – allowed the city to cut the project schedule by more than half and deliver the project in less than 2 years to the Millbrae community. This was achieved despite several other challenges that the project team faced such as the COVID-19 pandemic, supply shortages, and the discovery of poor soil conditions on the construction site that required additional excavation and delayed the start of construction work.

The decision to change to design-build project delivery allowed the City of Millbrae to keep the project within the overall budget and, most importantly, delivered a new facility as quickly as possible to meet the needs of the Millbrae community.

Design-Build Team

Photos