Albuquerque Goes Uptown
Enticing Shoppers With Open-Air Mall

By Neal Singer

The lifestyle center concept comes to Albuquerque with the Uptown Center in the Northeast Heights, consisting of eight buildings with open-air access to retail stores, entertainment, offices and housing.

 

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Rather than imitating the imposing look of two nearby malls, the new lifestyle center rising in Albuquerque's Northeast Heights Uptown Center will consist at first of eight relatively small buildings, each with different facades designed for each tenant.

The new $55-million center, the first of its kind in New Mexico, is at Indian School Road and Wyoming Boulevard.

Access is open-air rather than within a single large building. Included in the center will be interesting stonework, decorative metal lattices, artwork and fountains.

Future additions to the one- and two-story buildings may add floors that include living quarters and offices.

"These lifestyle centers are taking the place of large interior-oriented malls," said Aaron Docsa, project manager for El Paso-based Hunt Building Co. Ltd., the developer of the project. "There, everything is inside. Here, everything opens to the outside." He added that in a lifestyle center, the buildings are put up one after another, and "if there's a hiccup along the way, you have to adjust immediately."

Jim Carnes, senior vice president and project manager for Albuquerque-based general contractor Bradbury Stamm Construction Inc., said it's important to be flexible.
On a project like this, "you can't lock in and be rigid," he added. "You have to move."

"This is fast-track in the truest sense," Carnes said. "The architects were still drawing and designing pieces of the project as we were building other things. You can't get everything lined out totally because things are evolving. We're building one building as we're putting pipe in the ground for another."

The first phase of the project will create about 200,000 sq. ft. of retail space. The second phase should add 150,000-sq.-ft.

Because there is an individual exterior for each building, there have been an above-average number of changes requested, Carnes said. "When I do a project, I like to plan from start to finish, but here you can't make definitive plans," he added.
Subcontractors have had to work around tight concrete supplies due to a federally-imposed tariff on Mexican cement.

John Chavez, the third-generation owner of Albuquerque-based Mutual Drilling Co., said that "while we're capable of drilling 500 to 600 lin. ft. a day [for piles], being that the concrete isn't there we can only drill 460 ft. a day. They're only allowing us 60 yds. of concrete a day."

Chavez said that when his company did the lofts on Gold Street in Albuquerque's downtown, 100 yds. per day were available.

What helped to work around this was a re-evaluation of the size of the holes and thus, the amount of concrete needed to fill them. Chavez said that when the job began, piles were expected to be 4 ft. in diameter and 75 ft. deep because architects designed the buildings so that additional floors could be added at a later time.

But load tests showed that smaller 2-ft.-diameter holes, 30- to 60-ft. deep, would do the job, Chavez said.

Still, the project, which began in April, is on schedule to open in November 2006.

Lillian Santillanes of Albuquerque-based Structural Services Inc., whose company erects the project's structural steel, agreed that the construction has been timely.

100,000 sq. ft. of steel framing has already been delivered to the job, added Carnes, with another 100,000 expected.

On this project, "a lot of miscellaneous canopies and trellises have been requested," she said. These take time and, because visible, more artistry, Santillanes added.

Architectural project manager Kendall Giles of Albuquerque-based Dekker, Perich and Sabatini said the architects also need to be flexible and willing to juggle tasks. For example, the firm provided key tenants material and color pallets to work from.

"Every tenant wants a certain look, material changes, specific architectural imagery," he said. "Most have an exterior style, yet there's also a need for "maintaining a sense of a whole and singular [Southwestern] style."

"This will be a new thing for Albuquerque," said Michael Burkett, an architect with Dekker, Perich and Sabatini. "In this one project there will be retail, housing, offices, entertainment - sometimes vertically, sometimes horizontally, and in phases."

The project is more expensive to build than a conventional shopping center because "instead of a single mammoth building, it is more buildings with more exterior walls, which I think translates into higher cost," Giles said.

"But the project took a piece of dirt that sat vacant for many years and is going to set a precedent for future development of the uptown area."

 
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