Business parks of the 21st century

Parks evolve from heavy-industry past

The term “business park” used to be a contradiction in terms, given that they usually were located in industrial zones.
The formula was simple: Take a heavy industry. Add an unskilled labor force. Find an old shell of a brick building. Place this in the “wrong” part of town. Add several more of the same. Sprinkle with heavy-metal waste, airborne pollutants, foul odors and a ghoulish appearance from across a contaminated river and É Voila! The industrial-zone business park!
Times, and business parks, have changed.
“What we are seeing today are a lot more parklike settings for business operations,´ said Merl Haworth, an architect with the Neenan Co. of Fort Collins.
Haworth said his company is engaged in the business of “archistruction,” the capability of accomplishing all phases of business-park development, from planning and design through construction and business development.
“On staff, we have real-estate brokers, project-development specialists, architects, construction specialists, construction managers,” Haworth said. “We even have what we call preconstructors, conceptual estimators. We are one-stop shopping.”
All those specialists with the New Age-sounding names are thrusting the “look” of the business park into the next century, inspired by some very traditional business concerns that dominate the late 20th century.
“There is a drive on the part of business for more efficiency,” Haworth added. “That means cost. You see it in simpler, less-detailed buildings.”
That simple architectural look is often accompanied by equally simple, but expansive, landscaping.
“Aesthetics are more important,” agreed Chris Ruff, a commercial real-estate appraiser and one of the developers of the Windsor Tech Business Center.
“What we are seeing in business parks is a high percentage of open, landscaped areas,” Haworth said of the trend to mate the efficient with the eye-appealing.
Local building regulations are often the driving force.
“There is often a limitation on the amount of the business park that can be covered with buildings, parking lots and driveways,” Haworth explained. “This is a step above zoning because they are tailored specifically to the individual site.”
Localities may even specify the exact ratios of office and open space. The requirements can create appealing results. Haworth cites the example of an Alcoa Co. building just completed in Arapahoe County.
“The site was planned for a 140,000-square-foot building on a 10-acre lot,” Haworth recalled. “That’s as big as the building could be. The rest is all landscaped. In five or 10 years, those open areas will become quite parklike. That’s the idea.”
In part, the expansive result is because projects are developed with a Western sensibility.
Business locations in the East often make building architecture the primary concern. In the West, the greater concern for landscaping may be because there is, quite simply, more land.
The East is a vertical world, the West a horizontal one.
“Out here,” Haworth noted, “there can even be restrictions on the height of buildings,”
But that does not mean business parks are necessarily composed of sterile, anonymous-looking, prefabricated boxes.
“Within the local restrictions,” Haworth said, “each building is allowed and encouraged to create its own character.”
However, business parks developed today do not allow industrial, sheet-metal-like structures.
“Buildings have to be concrete or masonry,” Haworth said.
For example, the building created by Neenan for Alcoa could not incorporate large amounts of that company’s signature product, aluminum.
Developers have also learned to focus on a client’s major concern, fulfilling it rather than every item on a company’s “wish list.”
Haworth cites the case of Applied Films Corp., a light-industrial high-tech company. The firm required swift completion of its large, precast concrete facility.
“We started in February,” recalls Haworth. “We’ll be out of there in October.”
That kind of speed requires 21st-century planning techniques, including limitations on the range of materials available to clients, and incorporation of the Japanese auto industry’s “just-in-time” inventory delivery system.
In newly designed business parks, the buildings are pared down, but facilities are pumped up in other ways.
“We do facilities that have locker rooms and showers,” Haworth said, “so people can walk or jog along a bike path at lunch time.”
The business park of the next century will conduct its telecommunications across a fiber-optic network. But although there are high-tech considerations in building the modern business park, the biggest change is the drive toward aesthetics that make good economic and marketing sense.
“In smaller business parks,” Ruff said, “you have to work hard to develop a park setting that doesn’t cost a fortune to maintain. But you do it because no business wants to look bad.”