UCLA Research Park at the Former Westside Pavilion

The Westside Pavilion opened in 1985, went dark, was nearly a Google campus, and is now becoming a laboratory.

UCLA bought the 9.2-acre property from Hudson Pacific Properties in December 2023 and is converting it into the UCLA Research Park: two buildings totaling roughly 700,000 square feet joined by an enclosed pedestrian bridge, inside a 1.3-million-gross-square-foot shell. Flad Architects is executive architect, with OBJ on landscape. Early occupancies begin in late 2027 and the phased build-out runs to 2035.

Project Scope

The environmental review describes a scheme that is mostly reuse. The existing shell and atrium stay. New construction is limited to a lobby pavilion, a conference center, expanded loading, and a redesigned entry plaza. Everything else is interior surgery.

That surgery is the hard part. Retail floorplates are deep, low, and organized around a central void, with structure and MEP capacity sized for shops and a food court. Wet lab requires the opposite: tight vibration criteria, high air change rates, chase space for exhaust, and floor loading that a 1985 mall was never asked to carry. The California Institute for Immunology and Immunotherapy, seeded by a $120 million Michelson gift, takes more than half the space on its own.

Why It Matters

Every metro in the country has a dead regional mall on good land with structured parking and transit nearby. Almost nobody has converted one to research use, because the engineering usually pencils worse than demolition.

UCLA has a reason most owners don’t: it needed contiguous laboratory space near campus in a submarket where land does not come available, and the mall was already entitled and already built. If the conversion economics hold across the ten-year phasing, the project becomes the reference case that other universities and life-science developers point at. If they don’t, it becomes the reason nobody tries again for a decade.

Project Team & Details