Stantec Architecture was stumped, having gone down several dead ends trying to design a system to manage the 48 ft of flexible conduit in the crawl space under FLEXLAB's rotational green-systems test building in Berkeley, Calif. The team worried about the conduit slack, which allows the turntable to rotate without ripping out the electrical service, snaking around on the concrete slab and getting tangled up or damaged.
Without a solution, construction had begun on the $15.7-million FLEXLAB, which stands for "Facility for Low-Energy Experiments in Buildings." Finally, Geoff Adams, Stantec's project architect, approached mechanical engineer Tony Zavanelli, a Stantec principal.