Epic Systems HQ
Putting High
Tech in the Trees
by Elaine Schmidt
How about meeting in a tree house?
The Epic Systems Corp. campus under
construction on a 348-acre site in Verona, Wis., consists of 11 buildings, underground
parking and a tree house for meeting space.
Work started on the $100-million-plus, two-phase project in June 2003. The
first phase, which includes six structures and the parking garage, will be complete
in late summer. Creativity Sought
The
Epic tree house is just part of an overall design that reflects the creativity
of Epic's corporate culture and a need for employee satisfaction and fun in the
workplace.
John Cuningham, chairman of the board of Cuningham Group Architecture
of Minneapolis, described Epic's employees as "bright young people with a
tremendous responsibility" who create software systems used in surgical suites
across the country.
"Epic's culture is one in which the individual
employee is highly valued and is empowered to make decisions and represent the
company," he added. "Every employee has his or her own individual office.
Lights are burning in those offices 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Our job
was to make this a place where these people could be productive and industrious
and yet look forward to coming to work."
Stephen Dickmann, Epic's
chief administrative officer, agreed. He said the individual offices and amenities
such as wood-burning fireplaces, operable windows, soda fountain and coffee shop
onsite are also part of the company's desire to recruit and retain the brightest
and best in a highly competitive field.
Creativity and a sense of fun have
become the watchwords of the project.
Each of the individual office buildings
on the campus will have its own theme, including garden, jungle, Scandinavia and
New York loft. Additional themes in individual rooms throughout the complex add
more unique spaces to the campus.
"The customer conference rooms have
themes like an airplane hangar, a circus, the northern lights, the galaxy and
a northern lodge," Cuningham said.
"Even the bathrooms in these
buildings have different themes."
The themes are supported by more
than just a few photos on the walls. In the hangar-themed room an airplane wing
hangs from the ceiling.
"The interior design of bathrooms is a big
deal to us - not just customer bathrooms, but all of them," Dickmann said.
"In this whole theming thing, no two floors of the buildings are the same." Challenging
the Designers Creating that variety required a nontraditional approach from
the designers.
"In a project this big, most people would opt for standardization.
You would set up a system and run with that for each of the buildings," Cuningham
said.
"But in this project, we are constantly thinking of new ways
to make changes."
Assigning different designers from the Cuningham
Group to each of the themed buildings helped create unique spaces.
Even
the tunnels connecting the buildings have been brought into the fun.
"In
one tunnel we are using a periscope to the surface so that an underground picture
window will look like you are at ground level," Cuningham added. The periscope
captures an image of the out-of-doors to surprise people below ground.
"We
have a skylight in one tunnel with a sundial under it," he said. "We
are also working on elements of surprise, like a tunnel that appears to collapsing
on those walking through it."
The tree house that is connected to
a building and accessible only from the outside is also a unique space.
"This
is a conference room that is completely separate from the buildings," Cuningham
said. "It is an actual tree house with access via a suspended bridge, about
80 ft. from the nearest building. It's all handicapped accessible, but you do
have to walk outside to get there."
The space is specifically designed
for brainstorming, with floor seating for about 24 people. There are no phones
in the structure and cell phones will not be permitted inside. Creativity
in Construction Creative thinking was also necessary on
the construction side of the project.
"This is terminal moraine,"
said Mike Dillis, vice president and project executive for construction manager
and general contractor J. H. Findorff and Son Inc. of Madison. "This is where
the glaciers stopped, melted and started to recede, dumping everything they were
carrying. As a result we have every variety of soil on this site that you can
imagine. We have peat, sand and clay so dense that the backhoe operator would
have to jiggle the bucket to make the dirt fall out."
In addition
to the varied soils, extensive preconstruction investigation revealed that there
was rock just beneath the top soil in some spots.
"We have never spent
so much time on a project doing borings," Dillis said.
Instead of
doing a typical boring, which goes down until it hits rock, borings on this site
had to go through the first layer of rock they hit to make sure it was solid.
"Just
because they hit rock didn't mean it was solid all the way down," Dillis
added. "In some places we could drill through 2 ft. of rock and below it
would be incredibly poor soil with the real rock 20 or 30 ft. below that."
Even
with the extensive investigations there were still a few surprises.
"We
would still end up digging a hole and finding rock, thinking it was good, digging
farther and finding poor soil," Dillis said. "Then we just had to do
what the structural engineer told us to do."
Some of the building's
footings were redesigned on the fly to accommodate the underground surprises.
"In
the first three months we were blasting rock and excavating out on a daily basis,"
Dillis said. The excavated rock was crushed and used under the roadbed on the
campus and as fill around buildings.
The uneven soil conditions also toughened
the task of drilling for installation of the complex's large geothermal heating
and cooling system. There are more than 1,200 borings between the project's two
phases, Cuningham said.
"We have had a well driller onsite for over
a year, and that is just drilling for phase one," he added. There is enough
water on the site that some of the borings, which are 20 ft. on center, created
little geysers from borings 20 or 40 ft. away. The soil quality also required
more grouting that would have been necessary in better soils.
Although
the fractured rock, variable soil and high water complicated the drilling process,
it will be beneficial once the system is up and running.
"The ground
contains a lot of fractured rock, sandstone and dolomite, which is all very porous,
but in terms of transfer of heat it is great," Epic's Dickmann said. "The
high water content of the soil will transfer heat away from the closed-loop system
quite efficiently, which will keep the ambient temperature of the well field from
rising."
Phase two construction was slated to begin this spring on
a large training center and large theater with 3,000 to 4,000 seats. The training
center is slated for completion in August 2006, followed by the theater.
Janesville-based
J.P. Cullen & Sons Inc. was named the general contractor of the second phase. |
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