Mesa del Sol Office Takes Less than Year to Design, Build

Mesa-Innovation Park Building 2 is the first office building in the Mesa del Sol complex to achieve LEED gold status.

By Neal Singer

The 218,000-sq-ft Mesa-Innovation Park Building 2 is open for business after taking only a year to design and build.   

The office building is part of the 12,900-acre Mesa del Sol mixed-use district, located on Albuquerque’s south mesa. The sustainably planned community includes commercial and industrial tenants such as Albuquerque Studios, Advent Solar, SCHOTT Solar and now Fidelity Investments as part of this project. Mesa del Sol was originally planned to include residential, but recently postponed that component due to economic conditions.

The project’s sustainable features include pervious concrete in the visitor parking lot, construction materials high in recycled content and efficient mechanical systems. (Photos courtesy Dekker/Perich/Sabatini)

Owned by Albuquerque-based Forest City Covington NM LLC, the structure, with a shell contract cost of $22 million, now houses 600 employees performing back-office functions for the financial industry. The eventual tally could be 1,600.

“What’s amazing about this building is how we were able to design and build the structure, qualify for a gold LEED rating and get tenants in less than a year,” says project architect Scott Leonard for Albuquerque-based Dekker/Perich/Sabatini.

The fast-track job took teamwork between the architect and Albuquerque-based general contractor Klinger Constructors LLC, says Leonard, who adds that rapid service from city of Albuquerque inspection offices also helped.  The project’s “green path” helped expedite the city’s permitting, Leonard says.  “It’s a great program by the city,” he adds. “A LEED building is not the cheapest thing to build, but there is this incentive:  the owner gets to open earlier to recoup costs.”  

Similarly happy with the rapid construction turnaround is Ray Smith, project manager for Klinger, who says it took only eight months of construction to complete the building’s shell and 10 months for the first 117,000 sq ft to be done inside and out. He cites coordination with architects as well as “superior management techniques.”

Among those techniques were Klinger’s decision to do part of the concrete work itself and sub out the rest. “That way, we could have multiple companies working in the same discipline to help accelerate the schedule,” Smith says. The same was true for the steel work, he adds. The project used 15,000 cu yds of concrete and 1,100 tons of steel.

“We used fast-track methods for building the entire project,” Smith says. “We ordered components of buildings at the earliest possible moment. To do that, you have more risk. To mitigate that risk, you do more analysis. We ordered as soon as the materials were sized.”

The two-story structure could have looked like two roughly 55,000-sq-ft brown boxes separated by an atrium core, but small architectural touches helped prevent that. Windows lining the west- and south-facing sides were installed in 3-, 7- and 10-ft widths, creating a pleasing irregularity.

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Recessed to provide shade from direct summer sun, they were accented brightly to contrast with the overall brown coloring. Unrecessed strip windows on the north offer wide views of Albuquerque. A high inverted-U atrium entrance provides the sense of a significant corporate entry point.

Other innovations contributed to the building’s high LEED rating.

The visitor parking lot is made of pervious concrete - a mixture of coarse aggregate, Portland cement, water and little or no sand. One of the first such installations in New Mexico, the highly permeable product is said to resemble popcorn before being steamrolled.

It permits three to eight gallons of water per minute to pass through each square foot. Rainwater is expected to migrate into the water table almost as though the concrete is not there, recharging ground water and reducing stormwater runoff.

Showers and changing rooms throughout the building encourage the use of “alternative transportations” such as bicycles, Leonard says. There’s also a fitness center and lockers to help promote employee health, designed by Cincinatti-based BHDP Architects, which also designed other internal tenant improvements for the building.

Major building materials and exterior colors were designed to be compatible with surrounding environment and include three-color EIFS, galvanized-finished metal panel systems, aluminum curtain wall systems and insulated glazing.

Hybrid gas-electric vehicles will command 66 premium parking spaces out of 1,200 available. “The typical person will have to park further away,” Leonard says.

The project also has committed to purchase wind- or solar-generated electricity for 35% of its energy needs for four years, Leonard adds.

As is typical in LEED-oriented construction, landscaping was chosen from drought-tolerant native species, chlorofluorcarbons are not allowed in refrigeration systems, outgassing from new materials is strictly controlled and swales and gutters direct water toward landscape areas.

The minimum point total required for LEED gold rating is 34.  The building’s construction has earned 39.

“The owners are very happy with this project,” says Anne Monson, marketing vice president for Mesa del Sol.

Key Players:

Owner: Forest City Covington NM LLC
Architect: Dekker/Perich/Sabatini
General Contractor: Klinger Constructors LLC
Engineers: Dekker/Perich/Sabatini; Bohannan Huston; Allied Engineering and Design; CCI Engineering
Subcontractors: Mechanical Concepts; Hanna Plumbing; Chavez Concrete Contractors; Chaparral Electric

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