Project Profile the offices be functional and unpretentious. That imperative showed up in the design in two key areas. “I designed the building with a ‘headband’ to serve as a mechanical screen but with the opportunity to put the Range Resources name on the building as a sign,” says Turkall. “But Range declined, saying that wasn’t their style. They are very conservative in that regard.” Turkall says that their conservative nature showed up in other design decisions as well. The more challenging decision that resulted from Range’s functional imperative was the choice of hard offices rather than open floor plan for the main space. This decision rippled into all areas and influenced many parts of the critical path, even creating the need for a separate designer for the interior space. John Applegath explains that because the staff in headquarters is largely professionals - project managers and engineers – Range felt that they would be most effective in private offices instead of cubicles. What that meant for the design was a shift from perimeter offices to over 400 hard offices throughout the building. It also meant that the space planning would run concurrent to the start of construction for the shell. The move away from open plan would also make the task of LEED certification that much more difficult. None of these design/construction headaches outweighed the clients’ concerns about their staff’s performance after they occupied, so the team moved ahead on two tracks.
“There was a lot of time spent planning and doing analysis to see where all the Range people would be located,” says DiGregory. “That planning was absolutely necessary but it meant that they were doing drywall and metal studs before we had the building buttoned up!” The decision to run the interior and core/shell on parallel tracks allowed for the extra planning needed but it also necessitated the need for a separate interior designer. “The overlap in schedule with the tenant improvements and the core and shell would create so many submittals that we were concerned it could bury one firm,” explains Swisher. “We decided that Horizon would manage the submittal schedule and match it up to the critical path. We recognized that we could have 100 submittals and RFI’s in at the same time.” Kernick Architects was chosen to do the interiors and the LEED consulting on the project. Rock Kernick explains that solving the design issues of the hard offices also helped solve some of the LEED challenges, particularly with regard to lighting. “We took what I called the ‘big giant grid’ approach, laying out the ceiling grid first and building the walls and windows for the offices to meet the grid,” he says. “We used creative lighting – downlighting and specialty sconces – to break up the institutional look of the long hallways and the spots where the ceiling and walls didn’t line up well.”
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