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December 31, 2024
The Hawai‘i Section of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) honored the Walter Dods, Jr. RISE Center as the Grand Overall Winner and Best Large Project at its 2024 Outstanding Civil Engineering Achievement Awards this fall.
This latest accolade adds to a growing list of achievements for the RISE Center. Earlier this year, CoStar Group named it the Redevelopment of the Year and NAIOP Hawai‘i gave it an Award of Excellence (Public/Government Project) as part of its Kukulu Hale program.
“RISE Center was recognized by ASCE for several factors. It was a challenging project to not only renovate the historic building, but also to integrate it into the new construction,” explained Fernando Frontera, Senior Associate at the Honolulu structural engineering firm BASE. “RISE Center won ASCE awards and was also recently recognized by the Structural Engineers Association of Hawai‘i with its SEAOH Engineering Excellence Award in the Renovation or Retrofit category. We thank Hunt and the UH Foundation for the chance to work on this project that has an impact on the rest of the university and local community.”
The $70 million live-learn-work RISE Center opened, on time, to the first University of Hawai‘i student- residents for the fall semester of 2023. The project successfully repurposed the landmark 1930s Charles Atherton House building into a state-of-the-art educational facility flanked by two new six-story student residential wings. RISE Center is located on the corner of Metcalf Street and University Avenue at the flagship UH Mānoa campus.
In 2019, Hunt Companies Hawai‘i, UH and the UH Foundation entered into a public-private partnership (P3) to design, build and finance RISE Center, the first P3 for the university, and the first new UH student housing in 15 years. The first-of- its-kind entrepreneurship-and-innovation center for Hawai‘i was fully funded with private, non- taxpayer money.
