Safety and Security Without the Fortress Look

Designers of public-sector emergency-response buildings eschew the bunker image and incorporate transparency, sustainability, and state-of-the-art technology
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From Architectural Record
Joann Gonchar, AIA

As part of the $50 million gut renovation and addition, contractors demolished interior partitions, finishes, and the exterior enclosure. Using the existing reinforced-concrete structure, they built a state-of-the-art facility that incorporates features including redundancies in its mechanical and telecommunications systems, enhanced blast resistance, perimeter security, and monitoring and filtration of outside air, intended to protect it from a variety of threats, both natural and man-made.

Despite these precautions, New York City's OEM does not look like a fortress. In keeping with the agency's public mission, the architect, Swanke Hayden Connell, worked to endow the building with a civic presence. "The OEM is not a bunker or a container for technology," says Joseph Aliotta, Swanke Hayden Connell principal.

 

 

The choice of a rain-screen facade for the Illinois SEOC (above left and top two) provided a weatherproof envelope early in the construction process so that interior fitout could proceed. Although the limestone-clad entry elevation (top two) seems impervious, the lobby beyond is filled with daylight (above right).
Photography: © Barbara Karant/Karant Associates

 

 

Aliotta and his team relocated the core of the building from the center of the floor plan to the main facade. 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.

 

 

During an emergency, Illinois decision makers gather in the SEOC incident-response center. The two-story room contains a range of telecommunications technology to help them track events throughout the state.


1. Incident-response center
2. Communications center
3. Data center
4. Conference center
5. Support and infrastructure

 

 

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.

 

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Originally published in Architectural Record.
Originally published in October 2007

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