DBIA Honors Innovation Hall with National Award of Merit
We’re proud to share that Innovation Hall has won a 2026 National Award of Merit in the Educational Facilities category from the Design-Build Institute of America!
Built via progressive design-build delivery, Innovation Hall is the nation’s first academic building shared by a university (University of Washington Bothell) and community college (Cascadia College).
From the start, the project team set out to maximize space for instruction and research while making every dollar count. Along the way, we weathered a variety of unforeseen challenges: from a concrete drivers’ strike to pandemic-related cost hikes and materials scarcity.
The result is a 78,000-square-foot project with 30 laboratories and classrooms, 34 faculty offices and shared student gathering spaces distributed across four floors. Programs are strategically co-located so that related disciplines from each institution sit adjacent to one another, fostering the cross-institutional collaboration the owners envisioned.
To maximize the value of the project, the design-build team pursued a strategy it called “overbooking the flight”: planning a larger building than initial benchmarks suggested the budget could support. As risks were mitigated and savings realized, contingency funding became available and could be reinvested into the project.
The team ultimately delivered a building 12% larger than comparably priced academic facilities and expanded capacity by 72 full-time-equivalent students annually.
Innovation Hall is now in the running for the National Award of Excellence in the Educational Facilities category at the 2026 Design-Build Conference & Expo on November 5th in Cleveland.
Read the full DBIA press release here.
Congratulations to the Innovation Hall team and the other honorees!
Client/owner: UW Bothell, Cascadia College
Design-builder: Lease Crutcher Lewis
Architect: Mithun
Engineers: KPFF; Otak; Apollo
Specialty contractors: Glumac; Cochran; Hargis; Research Facilities Design (RFD)
Photo credit: Lara Swimmer/Esto
We’re proud to share that Innovation Hall has won a 2026 National Award of Merit in the Educational Facilities category from the Design-Build Institute of America!
Built via progressive design-build delivery, Innovation Hall is the nation’s first academic building shared by a university (University of Washington Bothell) and community college (Cascadia College).
From the start, the project team set out to maximize space for instruction and research while making every dollar count. Along the way, we weathered a variety of unforeseen challenges: from a concrete drivers’ strike to pandemic-related cost hikes and materials scarcity.
The result is a 78,000-square-foot project with 30 laboratories and classrooms, 34 faculty offices and shared student gathering spaces distributed across four floors. Programs are strategically co-located so that related disciplines from each institution sit adjacent to one another, fostering the cross-institutional collaboration the owners envisioned.
To maximize the value of the project, the design-build team pursued a strategy it called “overbooking the flight”: planning a larger building than initial benchmarks suggested the budget could support. As risks were mitigated and savings realized, contingency funding became available and could be reinvested into the project.
The team ultimately delivered a building 12% larger than comparably priced academic facilities and expanded capacity by 72 full-time-equivalent students annually.
Innovation Hall is now in the running for the National Award of Excellence in the Educational Facilities category at the 2026 Design-Build Conference & Expo on November 5th in Cleveland.
Read the full DBIA press release here.
Congratulations to the Innovation Hall team and the other honorees!
Client/owner: UW Bothell, Cascadia College
Design-builder: Lease Crutcher Lewis
Architect: Mithun
Engineers: KPFF; Otak; Apollo
Specialty contractors: Glumac; Cochran; Hargis; Research Facilities Design (RFD)
Photo credit: Lara Swimmer/Esto