The University of San Francisco Harney Science Center Innovation Hive has won a 2025 AIA San Francisco Design Award in the Interior Architecture category. The awards program celebrates the transformative power of architecture and its ability to foster innovation, enrich the human experience, and elevate the public realm.
Flad led the design of the adaptive reuse project, which provides a multidisciplinary collaborative campus space that is open to students 24 hours a day. The project provides a blueprint for continued growth through a master plan that repurposes a 110,000-square-foot building of the past into a building for the future.
The collaboration hive and makerspace at the entrance of the five-story building is a nexus for students and faculty to connect. The hive is a flexible, informal learning space for real-time, collaborative problem solving.
Connected to the hive, the makerspace invites new voices to participate in science and discovery, supporting a sense of community and cross-disciplinary entrepreneurship in a hands-on learning environment. This rapid prototyping suite features a materials lab, advanced fabrication lab, and ideation nodes knit together for students to form project teams, build experiments, design code, and simulate products and processes of real-life R&D centers they will soon lead as professionals.
Work done in the Innovation Hive centers on addressing grand challenges and advancing the three pillars of USF's Horizons Initiative: technology and adaptation, health and well-being, and sustainability.
The renovation honors the original structure while reinventing and right-sizing collaborative space to strengthen the identity of the college of arts and science and the dynamic relationship between teacher and student.
See the Innovation Hive in Action 
University of San Francisco Harney Science Center, Innovation Hive
May 13, 2025