International airline EVA Airways Corporation has a new office campus in El Segundo, California, which reached final completion in May. As one of the larger design-build projects in the region, the campus encompasses two 5-story buildings totaling 150,000 sq. ft. wrapping around a 5-story above ground parking structure. It all sits atop a once vacant site, completing an area in the business-friendly city that has seen major redevelopment in the last decade.

“This is a project for a good group of end-users, providing them with a new North American headquarters and the ability to create more dynamic working environments for many other local businesses,” said Brent Bunting, who serves as the project executive.

As the general contractor, DPR Construction leveraged self-perform work (SPW) and 3D modeling expertise to maintain a high level of collaboration between EVA Air and its design partners, as well as keeping the project on schedule and within budget. Collaboration allowed for smooth sailing on a tight site footprint, ensuring deliveries, cranes erecting portions of the work, excavations, concrete pump trucks and more to keep the project flowing.

Creating Space for All

The campus goes beyond a typical office park, featuring “office condos” available for sale to small businesses that may otherwise not be able to own their own space. DPR worked in collaboration with kmd Architects, EVA Air, Messori Development and CBRE to bring this focus on designing for multi-tenant functionality to life, giving rise to the building’s unique exterior and circulation. Each “condo” includes its own private balcony or patio, and with a variety of materials and exterior articulation, the building skin design is different from any other project DPR has built in the region.

DPR’s team navigated through a few unique circumstances that included custom weathered metal finishes, complex window and door design, and incorporating a variety of materials on the exterior like plaster and a rainscreen system with weathered metal and phenolic panels. Additionally, the parking structure’s 2nd and 5^th floors are connected to the office buildings’ 2^nd and 4^th floors via four skybridges that improve accessibility for occupants. The connectivity between the structures added to the challenges with the site and skin coordination.

Flexibility though SPW and Virtual Modeling Expertise

Leveraging DPR’s sizable SPW team on the concrete parking structure helped minimize the impact of several weeks of unprecedented rain for the region, with onsite craftsmen working to prep for, clean up and mitigate the effects of the weather. SPW teams also performed other specialty and smaller scopes of work, such as miscellaneous carpentry, fire stopping and lobby ceilings, in addition to providing valuable design input throughout the preconstruction phase.

When a major design decision needed to be made, DPR worked closely with EVA Air to evaluate costs and weigh the benefits of each decision. An example of this was the decision between a cast-in-place concrete structure versus a structural steel structure. A concrete structure can provide a shorter overall height of building due to the depth of beams in a steel structure, and concrete can provide an attractive ceiling finish if left exposed. However, a concrete structure will require additional columns and walls within the footprint that steel structures can avoid with longer allowable spans. Ultimately, the openness of the spaces was a definable project feature for EVA Air, and so the decision to proceed with steel was ultimately made. DPR’s ability to demonstrate the end conditions through 3D modeling was essential to the ultimate decision to adjust the design, while simultaneously mitigating what would be major impacts to the design schedule.

As a result, DPR was able to collaborate with its design-build partners to work in constructability and value analysis into the design to ensure the project moved forward expeditiously.