New York City-based Turner Construction has filed a $12.3 million lawsuit against the University of California for allegedly failing to pay for construction of the school’s seven-story, 116,000-square-foot computer science building with a glass facade.
Following nonpayment, on Aug. 22, 2025, Turner filed a mechanic’s lien against the property, in the sum of just under $12 million for services, labor, tools, materials and equipment.
Turner built the Dr. Allen and Charlotte Ginsburg Human-Centered Computation Hall, named after the principal donors and known as Ginsburg Hall at 1031 Downey Way on the university’s campus. It is part of the Viterbi School of Engineering.
It was erected to “facilitate USC’s artificial intelligence, robotics and advanced computing programs,” per the suit filed in California Superior Court on Tuesday.
The HOK-designed building, which replaced a parking lot, marks USC’s first LEED Platinum-certified structure. It includes a two-story lab for researching and testing autonomous aerial vehicles, open-plan robotics labs, student collaboration spaces and creativity zones, plus a 300-seat auditorium and amphitheater.
At a ribbon-cutting ceremony in September 2024, then-USC President Carol Folt called the new building, “a revolutionary space.” She also touted to the media that the project took “more than 500,000 hours of labor, 12 million pounds of concrete and 145,000 bricks.”
It is a “centerpiece in Folt’s Frontiers of Computing ‘moonshot,’ a more than $1 billion initiative that supports ethical advancement in areas such as artificial intelligence, robotics and advanced computing,” the school said in a news release following the ceremony.
Yannis Yortsos, dean of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, said Ginsburg Hall was envisioned as the final piece of a campus trio with the USC Michelson Center for Convergent Bioscience and the Ray Irani Hall for Molecular and Computational Biology — a cluster meant to fuel work on everything from cancer to climate change.
Turner signed a construction contract with the school on Nov. 17, 2020, making Turner the prime contractor for the project. The project was completed by this June.
USC is “refusing to honor their contractual and legal obligations to compensate Turner and the trade contractors for their work,” the suit says. In addition, the suit claims the school didn’t “issue change orders and make payments for delays, changes, extras, alterations, and interferences.”
“We are aware of the lawsuit and are reviewing it in detail,” the university said in a statement.
Read more
Residential
Los Angeles
USC saves view of LA Coliseum sign after clash with developer, city
Commercial
Los Angeles
USC buys Hebrew Union College campus for $35M