Major Interiors Rehab Transforms Pitney Bowes HQ
August 15, 2007
When Pitney Bowes opened its new world headquarters building in Stamford in 1986, the $100 million pink and gray granite building designed by Pritzker Architecture Prize-winning architect I.M. Pei was hailed as a highlight of the city's redevelopment plan for its South End.
But 20 years later, the producer of postage meters, mailing equipment, and shipping and weighing systems decided that on the inside, it needed a major makeover to position the building and the corporation for the future. And the result was a 215,000-sq-ft project that is over hauling the building's interior. The effort began in March 2006 and is slated for completion later this year. By early summer, contractors had filed permits for $11.3 million in tasks for the project, according to Stamford's building department.
Pitney Bowes had considered selling the building and moving to smaller headquarters
in Fairfield County, says Maureen Fahey, its corporate vice president for global real estate. But after a partial renovation of 125,000 sq ft, the company realized it could reconfigure the building to fit more employees and consolidate from another site, saving $2 million in operations cost by shedding that facility.
"That [initial project] was so well received that the executive committee approved renovating the balance of the general office space," Fahey adds.
The project team, led by W & M Construction of Stamford as construction manager, had the tricky task of renovating a fully occupied building. The key element in the planning was staging the project in strategic phases so that crews would not interfere with employees and management, says Tiffannee Quinn, W&M's project manager.
"We're working closely with management to coordinate where we're working and where important meetings are taking place to reduce intrusions, whether through noise, dust, or just being in the way," Quinn says. "It's a daily effort."
To that end, Pitney Bowes provides a printout of where key meetings are scheduled every morning, says David Ludwig, W & M's site superintendent, who shifts crews to other areas if necessary.
"The project is large enough to have some flexibility,” he adds.
The project also addresses a key goal of the corporation to accommodate the cultural change over the past 20 years in the way people work, Fahey says. The building's sprawling floor plan and limited circulation didn't support today's more collaborative office practices, she adds.
In the reconfiguration, the building will have smaller private offices and more casual meeting areas, cafes, a library, and conference space.
Fahey says one of the project's most defining characteristics is its use of sustainable design, a focus that Pitney Bowes chose two years ago and used in its selection of the design team of Esposito Design Associates of Stamford, Partners for Architecture of Stamford, and New York-based AKF Engineers.
The focus began early on in the demolition stage, with a decision to find alternatives to hauling debris to landfills. The team had to assess whether materials, especially furniture, could be reused or recycled. By late spring, with 60% of the project completed, 450 tons of construction and furniture debris had been recycled and kept from landfills, Quinn says.
In the upcoming fourth of five project phases, the company plans to donate 120 used workstations to charity, which costs slightly more than recycling and adds a week to the schedule, says Jim Ryan, senior project manager at Pitney Bowes.
The team opted not to seek Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design certification because the project would have straddled various LEED categories, preventing it from getting an adequate number of points, according to a spokeswoman.
The team still is following LEED principles, with green features including:
- synthetic gypsum wallboard made of slag taken from coal-burning factories, a process that reduces acid rain
- paints with low levels or no amount of volatile organic compounds
- carpets manufactured to reduce off- gassing or the evaporation of toxic chemicals into the air for years after installation
- energy-efficient T-5 lamps
- wheatboard inners made of recycled
- wheat chaff for plastic laminate surfaces
- reclaimed wood, and
- linoleum sheet flooring instead of vinyl composite tile.
The project team managed to avoid some costs of going green. For instance, while synthetic gypsum wallboard usually costs more and requires a longer lead time to procure than standard wallboard, W & M leveraged the volume of the order to accelerate delivery and buy the product at no additional cost, Ryan says.
Though opening up the building for maximum daylighting was considered, Pitney Bowes only partially pursued that strategy. Instead, it banked its energy savings on an alternative plan that emphasizes indirect lighting, which better suits the narrow L-shaped footprint of the building, Ryan says.
Designers also chose occupancy sensors throughout the building to reduce energy consumption. A technologically advanced direct digital control, or DOC, system will replace original analog control systems, offering greater efficiency to HVAC and lighting equipment.
The team is also installing variable-speed drives on large fan motors that run the variable-air-volume HVAC system. And it is replacing standard 2- by 2-ft acoustic ceiling tiles with 30- by 30-in. tiles, which are recyclable. Switching to the new tiles will result in further savings because the original interiors had 14 different kinds of tiles, Ryan says.
The project entails upgrades of most major building systems. The team is installing Category Six-E cabling, the highest grade, to increase efficiency and reliability of computer networking. It also is expanding wireless networking access throughout the building, Ryan says.
The renovation increases the building's capacity by 150 seats, allowing the company to consolidate five of its business units, some of which were in other facilities. It also increased the amount of conference space from 16 large rooms to a roster of eight video conference rooms, 14 large and 32 medium-sized rooms, and 82 "huddle rooms."
It also will open up window views of Long Island Sound by eliminating perimeter offices from an elliptical shaped wall that runs more than 750 lin. ft. Crews also are reducing the height of workstation panels from 75 in. to 54 in.
In addition, the project addresses the facility's longstanding circulation problems by creating a new staircase that allows occupants to flow more easily through the building. The team cut through 250 sq ft of concrete slab on three floors.
Another highlight was construction of a bridge through an existing atrium that connects two wings on each of two floors, linking areas that were previously cut off from each other. That new continuous circulation path, which also overlooks the Sound and a park, creates what employees call an indoor "walk in the park."
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