California Independent System Operator Iron Point Facility
Best Office Project
California Independent System Operator's new $113-million, 278,000-sq-ft Iron Point headquarters in Folsom has three wings, each serving a distinct function and each created with a different structural system.
The building's two-story public wing houses a main lobby and reception area as well as training rooms, a board room, a cafeteria and support facilities.
The mission-critical wing supports essential services, including a transmission grid operations center and 40,000-sq-ft data center. The three-story office wing accommodates more than 500 employees and up to 250 additional contract workers.
The open-office environment includes workstation groups and formal conference rooms along with informal meeting areas to promote collaboration and interaction.
The office space was designed to be flexible to accommodate future changes in personnel, teaming arrangements and technologies.
One construction challenge took a team effort to resolve. Mid-State Precast designed the seamless precast panels in the mission-critical wing. These sandwich panels had an exterior of architectural precast, an insulation center core and a structural interior precast face.
The average panel size was cast 12 ft wide and 16 ft to 25 ft tall. The panel manufacturing plant was in Corcoran, Calif., where daily temperatures reached more than 100 degrees during the casting process.
The panels were cast in metal form beds and an accelerator was added to the concrete mix for a faster casting schedule. The high temperatures and accelerated curing caused shrinkage cracks in the panels.
After consulting with a third-party testing agency on the panels' structural integrity, the project team worked with industry experts to select an elastomeric coating for the exterior of the panel.
In keeping with California ISO's commitment to sustainability, the project earned LEED-Platinum certification.
In addition, project team members worked more than 425,000 hours on the job and had no lost-time incidents.
Key Players
Owner: California Independent System Operator Corp., Folsom
General Contractor: Clark Construction, Oakland
Construction Management: Vanir Construction Management, Oakland
Architect: Dreyfuss & Blackford Architects, Sacramento
Structural Engineer: Buehler & Buehler, Sacramento
MEP Engineers: Frank M Booth, Granite Bay; WSP Flack & Kurtz, San Francisco
Submitted by:
Clark Construction
