Georgia Gwinnett College Gateway Building Nears Completion

The Gateway Building serves as the new front door to campus, providing a program-rich venue catering to student, wellness, recreation, food service, convocation and events.

In early 2015, GGC completed a study to coordinate the campus utility systems with the planned architectural growth. The study focused on developing reliable, energy efficient and sustainable systems for cooling the entire campus, determining a centralized chilled water generation and distribution system would increase efficiency, reduce environmental impacts, and decrease electricity consumption by as much as 60%. The university's "Gateway Project" includes the central energy plant, as well as the construction of the university's first-ever Convocation Center –– two critical components to preparing GGC for the future.

Over the last 20 years, the college has grown into a 15-building campus that accommodates a student body of nearly 10,000. Despite this accelerated growth, the college never had an assembly building. The 72,280-square-foot Gateway Project building provided an opportunity to not only fill this gap in campus life with a multi-use student community hub, but also address the need for important infrastructure upgrades.

Looking ahead to 2025 and 2026, plans call for the central plant to be fully connected to campus, including the Convocation Center. The entire chiller project is on track to be completed in 2030. Photo credit: Carroll Daniel Construction

Project credits include:

Owner: Georgia Gwinnett College
Architects: SSOE Group, Hughes Group Architects
Engineer: RMF Engineering (MEP/FP, chiller plant, utility distribution)
General Contractor: Carroll Daniel Construction

Supporting the exciting addition to campus and GCC's future growth, the infrastructure portion of the project replaces individual, local building units with a scalable central cooling system and underground distribution network that serves the buildings surrounding GCC's lawn. This important upgrade to the campus' central utilities infrastructure provides a higher level of redundancy and flexibility for easy incorporation of future advancements in refrigeration technology.

News coverage on this announcement can be found here:

Spaces4Learning, "Georgia Gwinnett College Construction Project Nears Completion"