OMAHA — Union Pacific Corp.’s soon-to-be-developed downtown headquarters will have more office space than any other building in Omaha, reports the Omaha World Herald.
When it is completed in 2004, the $260 million, 19-story Union Pacific Center will have 780,000 square feet of office space, out of 1.1 million square feet total building space. Everything except for the building’s first three floors – with a lobby and cafeteria – will be devoted to offices.
The company’s existing headquarters, with a total of 575,000 square feet, has roughly 440,000 square feet of office space.
The new headquarters will be on the block bounded by 14th, 15th, Dodge and Douglas Streets. It is across Dodge Street from the current headquarters, which will be turned over to the City of Omaha.
Union Pacific last week requested bids from general construction contractors, and it expects responses by mid-December. Requests for bids from mechanical and electrical subcontractors will be sought after Jan. 1.
Jim Gade, U.P.’s director of facility management, said he hopes to have a general contractor by December and to break ground by March 1.
The company has hired about two dozen consultants to advise it on such things as interior design, mechanical and electrical issues, plumbing, acoustics, wind engineering, food service, civil engineering, security, landscaping, elevators, lighting, even window washing and curtain wall design.
Union Pacific’s new headquarters has been in the works since April 1999, Gade said. From then until June, when the company unveiled architectural plans, he said, executives spent a lot of time thinking about the building’s look and size.
Gade said executives settled on “something best for us as a company” to consolidate its nearly 4,000 employees in Omaha, now scattered in 10 locations, and to accommodate up to 700 customer service and accounting workers to be moved from St. Louis.
The U.P. development team refers to the new building’s design as “the cube” because of its shape.
Gade said the design is ideal because it will allow large spaces on all 19 floors, permitting departments to be housed on just one or two floors. In a taller building with smaller floors, a single department might have occupied four or five floors.
Don McCormick, a vice president for Hines, an international real estate developer based in Houston that is affiliated with the U.P. project, said that in the 1970s and 1980s buildings often were built for corporate egos – the bigger, the better.
“We did a quick analysis to do a building, and our answer was a 27- or 30-story tower with a larger base,” said McCormick, who is in Mission Hills, Kan. “After looking at it and talking about efficiencies, the current scheme really was the unanimous choice.”
Outside, the new headquarters will have a glass exterior atop a stone base. Gade said the company is looking at using Kasota, a golden limestone mined from Minnesota, which also was used in The World-Herald’s 1940s-era building at 14th and Dodge Streets and in the old Federal Building at 15th and Dodge.
Gade said Kasota stone will help the headquarters blend into the city’s downtown fabric.
The headquarters will have more than 20 antennas because a major function for the company’s largest operating unit, the Union Pacific Railroad Co., is communication. The company needs to track its trains, shipments and other operations along 33,000 miles of track.
Inside, the ground floor will be open to the public during regular business hours, Gade said. There will be two gift shops – one focusing on railroad memorabilia – and historical displays.
The Union Pacific building’s main attraction inside the lobby will be a roughly 20-by-20-foot video screen that will broadcast information about the railroad, the city and Union Pacific’s heritage and future.
“That aspect deals with the ability of the railroad to communicate the nature of itself as a major business,” said Bill Hartman, a principal architect for the U.P. project at Gensler Architecture Design & Planning Worldwide’s office in Detroit.
The building’s second floor will have a 27,000-square-foot cafeteria, open to the public, with seating for 600. It will feature three different environments (bistro, traditional and outdoor dining) and a 24-hour food station.
The building will have a barbershop and credit union in the lobby of an underground tunnel linking the headquarters to a 1,280-space parking garage to be built on the block bounded by 12th, 13th and Dodge Streets and Capitol Avenue.
Amenities for employees will include a 17,000-square-foot fitness center, three times larger than Union Pacific’s current facility.
Gade said one feature that’s less visible but exciting will be a 12-inch-raised floor air conditioning system. “All the fresh air comes through the floor,” he said.
Ron Feuerbach, vice president of Alvine & Associates Inc., an Omaha engineering and consulting firm, said workers will be able to adjust air temperature in their space with a swirl diffuser, a round device similar to the vents in a car.
“It’s been around in computer rooms for decades, but it’s a new application of that technology to office space,” Feuerbach said, adding that the under-floor system in other cities is a selling point to potential tenants.