A Little Bit of Everything
By K. Robert Wendel

The new, 85,000-sq.-ft. Ktech Building in Albuquerque is like a smorgasbord - it's got a little bit of everything.

The $6 million project, located in the Sandia Science and TechnologyPark, features offices, manufacturing space, research laboratories and clean-room space, all in support of the business efforts of the Ktech Corp., a civilian firm contracted with the research labs for a variety of purposes.

Albuquerque-based Jaynes Corp. has been at work on the project since January, with plans to wrap up work this month.

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The project has been somewhat of a moving target, with owners increasing the originally planned 56,000-sq.-ft. job to more than 80,000 sq. ft., along with some 50 change orders.

"They had a wide range of programmatic requirements because they are collecting seven different businesses under one roof," said architect Joe Slagle of JLS Architects Inc. of Albuquerque. "We are just trying to keep up with that."

Offices dominate the second floor of the two-story project, with a grand front entrance with a two-story lobby clad in translucent panels and sanded glass panels.

"They wanted it to be nice, but not too nice, so we did as much as we could with those restraints," Slagle said. "Sandia Labs is sensitive as to how their subcontractors are being paid, so the Ktech people wanted something contemporary but simple."

While the exterior of the building is simple, the interior is anything but. Contractors needed to supply both compressed air and gas through the labs and manufacturing areas, along with heavy-duty mechanical systems for the mid level clean rooms.

Sundance Mechanical performed the mechanical work while Chaparral Electric Co. Inc. ran the wires. Both firms are based in Albuquerque.

A massive, top-secret vault was also part of the program, creating security headaches for contractors who needed to closely monitor all activity around the vault during construction.

"They have a cast-in-place vault to store sensitive documents, so security in that area has been tight all through construction," said Jerry Lucero, a project manager for Jaynes Corp. "Everything had to be videotaped and shown to the owner and all the names of the people that enter the vault had to be documented."