Lord Corporation Office Building
Cary, NC
Client
Size
Completion Date
Sustainability
Awards
Lord Corporation
49,500 square feet
2012
LEED Gold®
2013 AIA NC Merit Award 2013, AIA Triangle Merit Award
Architect
Our role
Perkins&Will
Kenneth Luker served as Lead Designer during previous association with Perkins&Will.
All photographs © Mark Herboth Photography LLC unless otherwise indicated.
This small, four-story office building is set in a wooded site as part of the company’s corporate campus of office, research, and manufacturing facilities. Three levels of open office work environments provide high quality, flexible workspace for several small administrative departments. Each level includes shared meeting rooms, a work room, and small break room while a larger, two-story lounge above the main entrance serves the entire building. The lowest level partially exposed and includes a data center and IT Lab in addition to building utilities and shipping/receiving.
To offset the isolating characteristics of working in corporate departments and to build a sense of community, the design features overlapping double-height lobby and break room spaces connected by a monumental stairway. The result is spatially interconnected programs that bring employees together around shared experiences.
The side-loaded office building is organized into four parallel bars, each with a different program and organizational role. The first connects the entrance to the car park with a welcoming portal that also has a stairway to the lower level for bike parking and connections to a series of paved campus trails. Above the entry portal is the two-story break room with glass on each end and a strong, spatial connection to its bucolic context. The second bar is the densest and contains the lobby, meeting rooms, work rooms, stairways, restrooms, and small break rooms. The third bar contains an open office work environment with generous, full-height glass on all sides. The fourth bar is lower and dedicated to utility services.
The LEED Gold® certified design features several sustainable site design elements that minimize land disturbance, protect local ecology, and manage water consumption. The building structure features a number of high-performance assemblies and sustainable materials such as brick made from reprocessed sewage waste and other non-clay and post-consumer materials.
