Safety and Security—Without the Fortress Look

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The new configuration allowed creation of a large clear-span space for the third-floor emergency-operations center and a loftlike open office area below. Within this new core, the architects carved out terraces that help screen generous expanses of glass. By using the depth of the core to create a screen, and by cladding the building with a combination of zinc panels and limestone—the facade material of a federal courthouse at the southern edge of the park and a group of other nearby civic building—the architects provide transparency and acknowledge the context.

Information-technology overload

Emergency-response facilities require a great deal of information technology. Shoehorning this infrastructure into the framework of an existing structure, as the design team was required to do in New York, often calls for inventive solutions. Just some of the services in the watch-command room, for example, are satellite, broadband, cable, radio, wireless, and land lines. A constrained floor-to-floor height of only 12 feet precluded also making the raised floor depth large enough to house an under-floor air system. Instead, contractors threaded air-handling units and ducts through open-web trusses supporting the roof. And in order to create the ideal sight lines from the room's four workstations to wall-mounted rear projection units, they eliminated the raised floor in half of the room, explains Steven Emspak, Shen Milsom Wilke principal, the project's communications, multimedia, and acoustical consultant.

As designers had done in New York City, the architects DeStefano and Partners created a veiled facade for their Illinois State Emergency Operations Center (SEOC) in Springfield, completed in 2005. Partly motivated by an aggressive schedule that allowed only 19 months for design and construction of the 50,000-square-foot facility, DeStefano enclosed the two-story, steel-framed structure with a rain-screen system, providing a weatherproof envelope early in the construction process so that interior fitout could proceed. Contractors installed the finish cladding of limestone panels and perforated copper near the end of the construction process.

This facade strategy also screened the interior from view while allowing daylight into the building. For example, the "folded" entry elevation, clad in limestone, presents a seemingly impervious facade from the street. But hidden between the folds are windows that provide plenty of daylight for the reception area. Similarly, the copper scrim protects office windows, but allows daylight to filter through its perforations. "We tried to turn the project requirements into an architectural opportunity," says Avi Lothan, DeStefano design partner.

The veiled approach not only addressed scheduling and security concerns, but also provided protection from natural disasters. The impact load of a tree thrown into a window during a hurricane or tornado can be more difficult to design for than terrorist activity, according to Lothan. However, the screens act as a "sacrificial" layer and safeguard the glazing from such loads, he says. The copper, also used to create an enclosure for rooftop equipment, has the added benefit of shielding electromagnetic interference that could disrupt telecommunications, points out Michael Kuppinger, senior vice president of ESD, Chicago, the project's mechanical and technology consultant.

In case a natural disaster or terrorist activity compromises municipal services providing power, water, or sewage disposal, the SEOC, like most mission-critical facilities, incorporates many redundancies. It has a diesel generator and storage for potable water and mechanical system make-up water, allowing the building to function independently for up to three days, even in a "doomsday scenario," say Lothan.

Natural disasters were also a key concern for designers of the Los Angeles Emergency Operations Center (LA EOC), a county facility now under construction at the edge of Little Tokyo. "The building must remain operational after a major event," says Ernest Cirangle, AIA, HOK design principal. "And the most likely event here is an earthquake."