The 1936 Beaux-Arts office building in San Francisco's Civic Center National Historic Landmark District was vacated in 2007 due to seismic deficiencies.
Value engineering and careful planning helped the team deliver the $17-million East Valley Water District headquarters 71 days ahead of schedule and $400,000 under the guaranteed maximum price—all while maintaining a spotless safety record.
Seismic upgrades were performed and all major building systems were replaced on a 1920s-era, 26-story tower—one of the tallest buildings of its time on the West Coast.
The fast-tracked design-build project became the first social infrastructure project in the U.S. procured under the principles of performance-based infrastructure (PBI) contracting, which uses a public-private partnership not only to fund design and construction but also to provide long-term operations and maintenance.
As a leader in genomic research and the study of climate change, the institute set out to build the most ambitious sustainably designed biological research laboratory in the world.
The meeting and learning center is the first large-scale commercial building retrofit to meet the U.S. Dept. of Energy's definition of an annual net-zero energy use building.
A partnering, design-assist approach and building information modeling helped the team contend with a dense urban site at the largest freestanding hospital in the Western U.S.