The first thing you notice is the light: a skylit six-story central atrium, sunbathed patient-treatment rooms, rows of daylit lab benches, and a broad, sunset-facing rooftop terrace. The 283,000-square-foot Joan and Sanford I. Weill Neurosciences Building at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) Mission Bay campus is crazy for light, even by California standards. For this atypical facility that integrates the research and treatment of neuroscience and psychiatry, SmithGroup and Mark Cavagnero Associates (MCA) took an unconventional approach, disregarding sterile institutional precedents in favor of a more natural environment. “I was trying to use this one idea of designing with light as opposed to a material—not steel, not concrete,” says design architect Mark Cavagnero. “Everything else is subordinate.”