G-Men Get a New Home
By K. Robert Wendel

The events of Sept. 11 awakened Americans to the reality that buildings that were once thought safe could no longer offer protection from terrorist attacks.

With that in mind, officials at the FBI's field office in Albuquerque began laying plans to construct a new office building that was more defensible than the current office in the city's downtown.

Now, a little more than 15 months after the start of construction, FBI officers moved into their new building in northern Albuquerque this fall.

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Constructed by the Albuquerque office of Jaynes Corp., the $16 million building employs high-end finishes and features to create a class "A" office building. The project also features a two-story, 144-space secure parking garage.

Jaynes Corp. delivered the project through a construction manager at-risk contract with a guaranteed maximum price to owner M.L. Harris & Co. of Oklahoma City. M.L. Harris & Co. is leasing back the office space to the FBI.

This is the third FBI project developed by M.L. Harris.

"The government services administration has for some number of years run a program that brings in private firms into competition to provide office space," said Mark Harris, a principal with M.L. Harris. "We like to think as a private developer that we can do it for less money."

The arrangement allowed the FBI to get a building in its budget without going through a more expensive General Services Administration procurement process. The government can also spread the cost out over the life of the lease, rather than investing a large sum up front.

"If the FBI were going to own it, it would have had a lot more stringent design criteria," said structural engineer Charles Stubbs, vice president of Albuquerque's Chavez Grieves Engineers, which performed the structural design.

The key to the building's defensibility is distance. After the Oklahoma City bombings in 1995, the federal government required new federal office buildings to have a minimum 100-ft. perimeter from places where cars or trucks could park. Boulders, some weighing as much as 30 tons, along with extensive fencing and restricted access, create a safe zone for the building and its occupants.

"It's very secure as far as being able to access the building," said project manager Thomas Thomsen of Jaynes. "We did an extensive amount of coordination with the FBI to make sure unauthorized people or vehicles couldn't even get close to the building."

The three-story, 102,000-sq.-ft. project features office space, a gym and break room as well as conference areas. The project takes its design cues from many of the 1930s era Work Project Administration buildings in Santa Fe. Designers used an extensive amount of traditional 3.5-in. brick, with Albuquerque's Beaty Masonry placing 50,000 units in multiple tones.

Cornices and a subtle color palette that echoes the colors of New Mexico's high desert compliment the simple and straight forward architecture. Sandstone bands running vertically add more accents, along with lightly punched windows, and horizontal brick banding of multiple colors.

"The developer works very hard to get a lot out of the money spent," said project architect Lisa Matthews, a senior designer with Oklahoma City-based Rees Associates.

"We thought masonry was the best choice because it gave us the best value and helped achieve the look we wanted."

Bernalillo, N.M.-based AMFAB Steel provided and erected 490 tons of structural steel for the building and 295 tons of structural steel for the 75,000-sq.-ft. parking garage in a turnkey package.

The most unusual aspect of the project is the two-story parking garage. Rather than using traditional precast concrete or even cast-in- place, structural designers chose castellated steel beams, essentially steel I-beams with large circular holes in them.

"The way a beam works, the deeper the member, the more it can span," said Mark Mosher, vice president of AMFAB. "We cut the steel with a torch and move the two pieces so the lows and highs match up. It gives us a lighter beam for the same load- bearing capacity."

>G-Men Get a New Home
>A vision Reborn
>A Privatized Project
>Building it Big
>Universal