Real Estate

Working Smarter
New Concepts in Office Parks Transform Big Boxes
into Comfortable Environments with Handy Amenities

A wooded walking trail is one feature employees like 
at the First Union Customer Information Center in Charlotte

By Ed Martin

Surrounded by unpacked boxes and new furniture, Kenneth Smith was leading a quiet revolution in how America works. The revolution wasn't obvious to Smith or his fellow employees at BDO Seidman LLP, one of the nation's largest accounting firms.

Clustered around work stations in their new quarters atop the $4.5 million Premier II building at Piedmont Centre Business Park in northern High Point, the 50 accountants and others were already busy in a bright, open room without walls, bathed in soft light flowing in through a wall of glass. Outside were trees, and across Westchester Road, a farm.

“The open layout is more efficient use of space, but we also want our people to be able to stand up, move around and see outside,” says Smith, BDO Seidman managing director in the Triad. “We still need private offices to meet with clients, but this gives us a better feeling and allows natural lighting.”

In many business parks like this, the corner office with sweeping view, a traditional executive perk, is giving way to work spaces that enhance employee morale and productivity.

Follow winding streets deeper into Piedmont Centre, to a 150-acre section called Mendenhall, being developed by Liberty Property Trust. Paths link workers to picnic areas, ponds and benches, and to the Triad's Bicentennial Trail greenway.

Aetna U.S. Healthcare, and, nearby on Mendenhall Oaks Parkway, Cigna HealthCare Corp., can be found here, on pleasant, inviting business campuses that can cut absenteeism a third and improve productivity. “We once thought mostly in terms of energy efficiency,” explains Haig Khachatoorian, an N.C. State University professor who studies how offices affect occupants. “Now we think also in terms of human efficiency.”

Out of sight, deep inside buildings in business parks, lie more signs of the revolution. In floors, walls and ceilings, infrastructure is changing. Integrated, computerized building systems enable such structures to virtually think for themselves. Developers call them intelligent buildings.

In projects like The Bissell Co.'s Ballantyne Corporate Park West in Charlotte, which will eventually total five million square feet, offices cycle themselves on and off to conserve energy. They breathe along with their occupants, through precisely controlled heating, ventilating and air conditioning systems, enhancing comfort and performance, and they watch over them to protect them against intruders or fire.

These are the business parks of tomorrow. Businesses are moving into them today.

“We've thrown the parlors that we used to have in our homes into the dust bin of history,” says Charlotte architect Terry Shook, president of Shook Design Group. “It's time now to throw the business park of the past into the dust bin of history, too.”

That's not a hard sell for those like Thomas Hill III, vice president of marketing and leasing for Liberty Trust in Greensboro, which owns and manages 2.5 million square feet of Triad business park space. Or, in Raleigh, Roger McFarland, principal in Craig Davis Properties Inc., which develops business parks.

“Tenants like Aetna tell us that if employees are happy in their environment, retention is better,” says Hill. “The lifestyle and environment of a business park achieves that, and that's important when employees will move to a competitor a mile away for 25 cents more an hour.”

Businesses increasingly realize that they can improve work environment and productivity simultaneously in office parks designed around what architects call the town center concept, adds McFarland. They incorporate not just jobs, but child care, restaurants, stores and housing.

The concept can be found in his company's 450,000-square-foot Campus at University Place in Durham, home to such tenants as Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina Inc., and the Craig Davis Venture Center on Centennial Campus at N.C. State University in west Raleigh.

But above all, the business park of 2000 is overshadowed by one dramatic change. Little more than a generation ago, it barely existed.

Instead, offices were largely in downtowns. No longer. The most obvious example is the 6,000-acre Research Triangle Park, but consider Charlotte, too. Despite the city's office towers and imposing skyline, nearly two-thirds of its 28.5 million square feet of offices are in the suburbs, including the state's largest office building under a single roof.

At the First Union Customer Information Center, 7,000 employees work in 2.1 million square feet of offices. In the spring, when dogwoods and daffodils are in bloom, they go on lunchtime runs along wooded trails, return to eat at a cafeteria that seats 1,100, and have their cars serviced at an auto repair shop. There's a general store, hair salons, and a child-care center for 444 youngsters.

But the trends apparent in Charlotte, the Triangle and Triad also hold true on a smaller scale in areas such as Asheville and Wilmington, where the typical business park — usually about 30 to 40 businesses on a 50-acre site — might fit inside the First Union customer center.

In a development like his city's Northchase, says Bob Fullerton, president of Commercial Realty Co., one of Wilmington's oldest commercial brokers, inclusion of upscale offices, child care, shops and supermarket means, “Unless you want to, you never need to go downtown.”

On Wilmington's Military Cutoff, a four-mile connector between Oleander Drive and Market Street, is another example of state-of-the-art design and layout. Renaissance Park at The Forum, a 23-acre Class A development by Swain & Associates LLC, is taking shape as the largest business park in southeast North Carolina.

Developed by 25-year veteran David Swain, the park will have 225,000 square feet of space anchored by Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, a financial services firm. Its Roman design, with limestone and patinated copper, mirrors that of The Forum, an adjoining, upscale retail-shop center. Nearby, when another financial firm, Merrill Lynch, wanted a distinctive building, Swain responded with one in which the company brought in South African mahogany-type floors, South African marble and other touches.

“The trend is for employers to want to provide a wonderful experience for their employees,” says Swain. “Twenty years ago, in my first job, I was in a wide open room with a metal desk. It was loud, and hard to concentrate. There's been a dramatic change. Today money is not as much a factor as environment.”

If the business park of tomorrow is here today, however, it is far removed from yesterday. How far can be sensed from a visit with Dale Brentrup, director of the building lighting and energy technology research lab in the College of Architecture at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

Brentrup simulates solar light and its impact on buildings and workers in a laboratory that uses models of actual structures, not just computer simulations. “We've visited older buildings where all the Venetian blinds had the strings cut off because office managers didn't want employees tinkering with their environment,” he says. “What we're developing today is more worker-friendly, but far more energy efficient, too.”

Easier said than done. The first step in navigating the world of office parks is accepting that developers can't do much about two things — weather and market forces, in roughly equal shares. There's one big given.

“Corporate America wants more people in less square footage,” sums up Robert Kirby, leasing director of Crescent Resources Inc., the development arm of Duke Energy Corp. “Tenants also want to be able to expand on a bigger floor, rather than going to multiple floors with the old, 18,000- to 22,000-square-foot floor plates. The minimum we do now in our office parks is 26,000, and they go up to 35,000.”

Bigger floors mean better efficiency. “You still need elevator and mechanical shafts and toilet systems,” adds Steve Schmitt, principal in the Charlotte firm of Merriman Schmitt/Architects Inc. “But you get more rentable space.”

However, pressure to squeeze more people into smaller spaces so thoroughly dominates design of modern business parks that it looms in ways visitors might never suspect. Like a Rubic's cube, one change affects another, and the push for larger floors is an example.

In the Imperial Center, off Interstate 40 and Page Road in the Research Triangle Park, Winchester Place is a four-story, 110,000-square-foot building designed for Principal Financial Group by Little & Associates, a Charlotte architectural firm. Tenants include Quintiles Transnational, which helps develop pharmaceutical products.

A graceful, curving brick building with white metal cladding and striking entrance canopies in keeping with its high-tech tenants, Winchester Place is typical of the new challenges. Even as workplace experts find more evidence that employees perform better in natural light, its larger floors make it difficult to get that light to inner reaches that Brentrup calls “dark holes.”

Solution? “Tenants more and more want us to put their hard-wall offices on the interior, with work stations for employees who spend more of their time in the buildings placed around the perimeter, with floor to ceiling windows,” says Rob Richardson, president of the corporate office division of Little & Associates. “Glass is what sells buildings now.”

In layouts like BDO Seidman's, sales representatives and others who spend less time on site, along with those like human resource directors who require privacy, increasingly occupy offices in the core of the building. “Historically, in our business parks, we took the most valuable landscape and gave it to the fewest number of people,” says Brentrup.

At the suburban First Union center north of Charlotte, conference tables have wheels and are rolled from one area to another to encourage spontaneous meetings and teamwork. Conference rooms have glass walls, for privacy when necessary. What's missing? None of the center's executives has an office with a door.

In Raleigh, Claude McKinney, director of development at Centennial Campus, the 1,000-acre research park that's becoming a model for the new generation of office parks, says open interiors — which first came into vogue in the middle 1980s — are proving to have unexpected results in the age of the Internet. Centennial Campus is now home to 54 businesses.

“Some small tenants still want absolute acoustical privacy, with walls to the ceilings,” he says. “But others feel that's like building a box for yourself. Open interiors encourage corporations to collaborate and partner. If you work behind closed doors, it's hard to do that, particularly if you have to get in your car and drive across town.”

Signs of the tug of war between efficient but inviting and productive work spaces spill outside.

In seas of red, blue, green and white, Jeeps, Hondas, Fords and Toyotas crowd the parking lots of Tri Properties Inc.'s Imperial Center, a 456-acre business park with nearly four million square feet of buildings. An acre is 43,560 square feet, or about the size of a regular Wal-Mart. Here, and at most business parks, parking lots are growing at a faster clip than the offices.

“Five years ago,” explains Greensboro's Hill, who's also incoming president of the Piedmont Triad Chapter of the National Association of Industrial and Office Properties, “state codes required four parking spaces per 1,000 feet of rentable space. Now, over half of our requests for space are companies that require five to eight parking spaces per 1,000 feet of offices.”

Parking equals people. Count cars at a business park and the impact of Kirby's point — corporations want more employees in less space — strikes home.

Open floor plans mean workers today inhabit cubicles with 150 square feet each or less, barely more than half that of a generation ago. “It's not unusual for a tenant to lease 5,000 square feet for an office that will have 35 people,” says Hill.

But curious things happen with that space. More of it is usable. “There are very few interior walls, and circulation becomes part of the work space, rather than nonproductive hallways,” says McFarland, the Craig Davis executive. “Absence of hallways and atriums, and smaller elevator lobbies and such enhance building efficiency ratios.”

Developers and architects, depending on what their tenants demand, use space differently. Call centers, one of the fastest growing business park uses — Charlotte now has more than 10,000 call-center jobs — simply squeeze more people into buildings and then attempt to arrange work stations to be more worker friendly. That's possible.

Studies, says McKinney, document increases in teamwork in offices without walls, and at the First Union complex, which is essentially a sophisticated call center, chairs and couches are scattered in areas where employees circulate, to encourage impromptu conferences. “The thinking is that work occurs all over a building in informal groupings, not just in offices,” adds Khachatoorian.

Others, like Liberty Property Trust, that focus on high-end corporate headquarters tenants, devote as much space as ever to atriums, lobbies and amenities shared by workers and visitors — usually about 12 to 15 percent of the total building — but configure offices themselves to accommodate more employees.

Visit Crescent Resources' Coliseum Centre II in Charlotte, for instance, and enter through cavernous lobbies with palms and marble floors. Above, spiral stairways ascend, from floor to floor.

Encouraging cooperation rather than chaos in the business park of 2000 and beyond, however, requires more than knocking down walls and building bigger parking lots.

South of Charlotte, not far from the South Carolina line, a young forest of crepe myrtle, oaks and other trees is growing. Ballantyne Corporate Park may be the first business park in the state with its own on-site tree farm.

“If we ever have to replace any of our trees because of disease or damage, we want to make sure we can come in with mature trees, rather than just saplings,” says Tom Pizzo, vice president of development. “Besides, the tree farm makes a nice amenity as it grows.”

With more workers in less space, adds Jay Henson, who designs business park landscapes for Little & Associates, such attention to surroundings both inside and outside of their buildings is vital. “Trails, water features and amenities like that soften the sea of asphalt we used to find in business parks and provide a less stressful environment,” he says.

The business park that's home to Sara Lee Knit Products in Winston-Salem is a case in point. On a 12-acre lake, the headquarters has balconies on each floor for employees to step outside for breaks, pavilions on the lake, and fountains, gazebos and park shelters.

“That gives it a human scale,” adds Henson. “Flowing water provides soft noise and the parking lots are arranged so you walk to the buildings along tree-lined walkways, not out through the middle of the parking lots.”

Smaller but innovative parks are taking similar steps. Take, for instance, the once thorny problem of state environmental regulations that require each building in a business park to provide a pond to handle its water runoff.

In Wilmington, says Fullerton, developers of parks such as Murrayville Station, whose tenants typically are numerous small companies in individual buildings, meet the regulations by using underground storm drains to pipe runoff to large ponds that then become centerpieces of the parks. “A headache has become a real aesthetic amenity,” he says.

But the success of the workplace revolution also dictated changes in the internal building systems of business parks like Ballantyne. Fewer office managers lock up thermostats — or cut the cords off Venetian blinds.

With more workers closer together, creating “microclimates” has become vital. Enter the intelligent building, say Pizzo and Brian Morrison, who directs office automation systems for the Commercial Electronics Division of Raytheon Co. The Massachusetts company has wired numerous Tar Heel business parks and their buildings.

Morrison says computer-centered, fiber-optic systems like Ballantyne's constitute “the central nervous system” of business parks. They transmit data digitally by light, not electricity, permitting precise and reliable control of heat, cooling, and security systems impossible a generation ago. That, adds Pizzo, also permits large developers like Bissell to link multiple buildings for greater economy and efficiency.

“One building is the host and has the host computer, permitting us to check energy management daily, monitor maintenance work orders and program buildings to turn lighting and security systems on or off at a certain time, depending on what the tenants need,” he says.

Typically, adds Morrison, microclimates in business parks can be sensitive enough to react to such factors as the warmth generated by lights — and the breathing and body heat of workers.

How much more will the business park of the future change? Perhaps full circle. Quietly, on the northwest side of Raleigh along Crabtree Creek, a plan for the next-generation business park is taking shape.

Developed by Shook Design for Highwoods Properties Inc. of Raleigh, The Carlton, a 140-acre project off Glenwood Avenue, calls for 900,000 square feet of offices, but also apartments and townhomes along a greenway leading to a village that contains a hotel, church, and retail shops with homes for shopkeepers above.

It resembles, Shook agrees, the small towns of a century ago. “The traditional business park is becoming a workplace village,” he says. “That gives us the opportunity to mix life and work for the betterment of us all.”

COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL. This article first appeared in the April 2000 issue of North Carolina magazine.