Sacramento State’s Science II Building will have a new name before we even finish construction. The facility is now known as the Ernest E. Tschannen Science Complex, named after the Sacramento businessman and philanthropist who donated $9 million to the project.
The university held a celebration and made the announcement last month on the 93-year-old businessman’s birthday. Ernest is an immigrant from Sweden who came to California “poorer than a church mouse” as a young man. He built his fortune in Sacramento in real estate and has given back to the community in many ways, including a $38.5 million grant to UC Davis and several donations that have helped beautify cycling and hiking paths around Sacramento’s rivers and Lake Tahoe.
Sacramento State President Robert S. Nelson and Mayor Darrell Steinberg attended the event to honor Ernest.
“We were singing ‘Happy Birthday’ to him when a cake modeled after the building was rolled out,” said Sundt Project Director Tim Blood. “It was a great event.”
The Design-Build project is a 96,000-square-foot, five-story facility that will centralize the College of Natural Sciences’ biology and chemistry departments. We have completed utilities, the building footprint and form work for cast-in-place concrete.
Structural steel should start going up as early as June. Work is expected to finish in June 2019 and the building is scheduled to open that fall.