The University of Washington broke ground Wednesday, Sept. 30, on a $231.1 million chemistry building funded in part by $129 million from Washington state.

The Chemistry Sciences Building will be a five-story, 104,500-square-foot facility for instruction and research in sustainable chemistry, human health, advanced materials and quantum science, as first reported by GeekWire. Nearly 7,000 undergraduates take at least one chemistry course at UW each year.

It opens in 2029.

The UW's College of Arts & Sciences and private donors are covering the remainder of the cost beyond the state appropriation. Gov. Bob Ferguson and UW President Robert J. Jones both attended the groundbreaking ceremony.

Ferguson framed the spending as a workforce investment, saying at the event that Washington's economy depends on innovation: "Maintaining our leadership requires a reliable pipeline of skilled, highly educated workers. We're proud to be an investor in this state-of-the-art new building."

The building will rise on the site of the old Chemistry Library Building, west of Bagley Hall on West Stevens Way NE. Once the new facility opens, UW plans a full renovation of Bagley Hall, which was built in 1937 and sits alongside the campus's Drumheller Fountain. Funding for that renovation has not been identified, a university spokesperson told GeekWire.

The UW Department of Chemistry is one of the largest in the country, with about 275 staff and faculty, 985 undergraduate majors and 320 graduate students and postdoctoral researchers as of the 2025 academic year. The department managed a $28 million research portfolio in fiscal year 2025, drawing grants from the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, Department of Energy and other sources.

Daryl Maeda, the Katherine and John Simpson Endowed Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences, said the building would expand collaborative research and give students hands-on lab spaces, according to a UW news release.

Skanska and Payette+EHDD are the design-build team. The facility will be among UW's largest new academic buildings in Seattle since the 72,000-square-foot Interdisciplinary Engineering Building opened in spring 2025.

The groundbreaking comes roughly 19 months after UW and developer Wexford Science + Technology scrapped plans for Brightwork, a 345,000-square-foot research building west of the main campus. UW cited shifts in the economy and university funding at the time.