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31BreakingGround November/December 2015


The Towerat PNC Plaza

At the beginning of October, employ-ees began moving into The Tower at PNC Plaza, the new corporate head-quarters for the PNC Financial Services Group (PNC) on Wood Street between Fifth and Forbes avenues. Move in will continue into January into the $400 million, 800,000 square foot headquar-ters that took five years to plan and build, consuming roughly 4.8 million man hours in the process. Construction started on The Tower in Fall 2012 with the demolition of the buildings on Wood Street and the side streets but planning for the project had begun well ahead of construction. PNC was one of the banks that managed the financial crisis the best and had been growing steadily as the economy re-covered. Major acquisitions and expan-sions brought new people to the com-pany and its existing properties weren’t adequate. “We needed space Downtown for con-tinued growth. The buildings we were primarily in, which were One and Two PNC, were of the age where they re-ally needed to be renovated,” explains

Gary Saulson, executive vice president and director of corporate real estate for PNC. “We’re a more international com-pany so it made more sense to have a large headquarters building where we could consolidate people and save money.” The decision to build a new head-quarters involved much more than just planning for space and function. PNC had developed a culture built around its sustainability and its prominent role in the revitalization of Pittsburgh. The corporation recognized its future success was going to be based on its ability to attract and retain talented people. These basic tenets informed a three-pronged approach to design and decision making. The planning process rested on three pillars: PNC as an en-ergy responder, workplace innovator and community builder. From the beginning of the process, which essentially started as 3 PNC Plaza was wrapping up, the aim was to build the greenest building in the world. As it turned out, that ambition would be multi-faceted.

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“I think every time we build a building we try to do a little bit better than we did before. We built PNC Place in DC, which was LEED Platinum, and we attracted a major tenant because they wanted to be in a LEED Platinum building,” Saul-son says. “Last year we sold that building for the highest sale price in DC history. When we put the team together, we really wanted to put together an all-star team. Quite frankly when I said I want-ed this to be the greenest building in the world, the response was: does it have to be? But my view is that if you don’t set your aspirations high you’ll never get there.

“I think we have to dream higher and we have to dream better. We’re building buildings to stand the test of time, to be here for 100 years. We need to build buildings where employees thrive if we want to be the employer of choice. Most people build buildings to look at; we build build-ings to look out of.” Architect Gensler and Managing Director Doug Gensler had been working with PNC for a decade, designing its LEED-Certi-fied branches as well as the office buildings that had been built. PNC brought in Buro Happold from London because of its expe-rience with ultra high performance buildings around the world. Saulson says that PJ Dick was brought in because of the great

experience they had working together on 3 PNC, which gave him confidence that PJ was the right construction manager for the ground-breaking new building. The team set about researching and planning what the world’s best-performing building would look like. The process involved extensive research and travel around the world. Thousands of ideas were generated and PNC wanted every one of them tested.

The chandelier-like beacon in The Tower’s lobby is actually made of LED lights that display information about the weather and the building’s perfor-

mance. Photo courtesy PNC Financial Services Group.

“I think every time we build a building we try to do a

little bit better than we did before. We built PNC Place

in DC, which was LEED Platinum, and we attracted

a major tenant because they wanted to be in a LEED Platinum building,” Saulson

says. “Last year we sold that building for the highest sale

price in DC history.


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Doug Gensler and his team had worked on other groundbreaking projects and, of course, had a com-fort level with PNC. The challenge in taking on a project like The Tower was to push the envelope without creating a building that didn’t work. The design motto was using the building to drive performance. “One thing that was available and important for all of us was that there was a schedule and a bud-get,” notes Gensler. “That allowed the team to have certain guard rails to ensure that the ideas being ex-plored, not only achieved the am-bitions of extraordinary sustainable performance, proved a platform for exceptional employee experience and client experience, and delivered

a building that PNC and City of Pittsburgh would be proud of, but that it also met the schedule and budget parameters. ”We didn’t push them to innovation that’s untested,” Gensler continues. “The systems that come together are a unique ecosys-tem of pieces but each one of them has been tested and evalu-ated on other projects throughout the world so that we could either talk to people that were currently operating them today or actually go physically see how they perform today. I’d say its lead-ing edge thinking, leading edge systems, not untested bleeding edge stuff.”

“We’re risk-takers but everything we do we test and verify,” agrees Saulson. “We looked at literally thousands of things. Some things we did; some things we didn’t do. Some things didn’t make sense.” Performance took on a number of facets. There was the obvious energy performance but PNC was as concerned about the em-ployee experience. Planning The Tower involved analyzing thou-sands of factors – some of which were pretty arcane – that would impact the employee’s experience as an occupant of The Tower.


Design and programming decisions were made within the context of PNC’s three major objectives for The Tower. Image courtesy Gensler.

Cafeterias and small cafes (shown above) are located on floors without Neighborhoods. Photo courtesy PNC Financial Services Group.

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“The way we look at buildings is a little differ-ent than a lot of owners because we literally go through the cycle of an employee’s life at work,” says Saulson. “When an employee arrives at work, what do they do? They walk through the lobby. They go through security. What kind of experience will they have at security? What kind of security system are we going to put in? What kind of experience are they going to have on the elevator? We literally go through their whole day. I will tell you that these are probably the nicest bathrooms in Pittsburgh. A lot of these things you can do without spending extra money. You just have to be thoughtful about it.” An example of that thoughtfulness is the eleva-tor. On most elevators the Door Open and Door Close button look very similar and are located close to one another. That makes it surprisingly difficult to react appropriately when you need to hold the door for an incoming rider. “One’s brain cannot process the information fast enough. You’ve probably been in the position of trying to open the door for someone and can’t figure out how to do it,” chuckles Saulson. “We went to the elevator company and said we want-ed the Door Open like four or five times bigger than Door Close and we wanted it to be on the left side, far away from all the other buttons. And it is. My guess is this is going to become a stan-dard. There are a number of things we did like that which we know haven’t been done before.”

Another example is the layout of the bathrooms. “We designed the sink with the hand dryer above the sink so you can wash your hands and dry your hands without dripping water across the floor. And every bathroom door opens out,” Saulson explains. “You have to think about that. That was a thoughtful, very deliberate decision. There are hundreds of thousands of de-cisions like that that we went through and made in order to make a building more employee-centric.” Perhaps the best-known of the employee-centric features of the building will be the two-story spaces that connect two floors, which PNC calls the Neighborhoods. The spaces are designed, says Gensler, to encourage PNC’s employees to mingle or collabo-rate with others on projects. There is recognition of the benefit of socializing and the value of a space away from the private office to take a laptop and work. To those ends, each floor with a Neighbor-hood has no kitchenette and each floor with a kitchenette has no Neighborhood. Instead, a staircase in the Neighborhood connects the floors. And each floor has a conference room, known as the In-ner Circle, which Haworth manufactured exclusively for The Tower. It was important to PNC that The Tower also fit into the com-munity. That meant holding numerous meetings with Downtown

neighbors – both residents and businesses – to get input on the design as it developed. Integration with the community, both physically and relationally, was one of the three pillars upon which decisions about The Tower were based. “I will tell you that this is probably the most transparent build-ing anywhere in Pittsburgh. The financial industry is not known to be transparent. We built a transparent building deliberately,” Saulson says. The driving features of the building’s physical performance are a vertical solar shaft that creates convection through the building up to a massive solar chimney and the double glass wall of the ex-terior. The Tower’s exterior wall is actually two glazed curtain walls which control the thermal properties of the envelope and activate the flow of fresh air. PNC wanted to have that natural ventilation be the heart of the building’s performance. “We did a thermodynamic study of Pittsburgh - 365 days a year, 24 hours a day – and looked at pollen count, pollution, humidity, air temperature and a variety of other factors,” notes Saulson. “We say that we’ll be able to naturally ventilate the building 42 percent of the time. I actually think we’ll be naturally ventilating the building more than 42 percent of the time because on sum-mer mornings in the early hours before employees arrive at work,


Photo by Connie Zhou Photography. Use courtesy Gensler.

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we’ll be able to naturally ventilate the building and cool it down. When every other office building in Pittsburgh would have its air-conditioning on we’ll be nat-urally ventilating. The Tower is designed to be 50 percent more energy-efficient than a conventional office building.” At the top of The Tower is a massive skylight, tinted black and angled to op-timize the absorption of the sun’s rays. Beneath the glazing is a plenum space above a black-coated concrete slab an-gled similarly to the skylight a few feet above it. This plenum space will be hot even on the coldest days. In fact, a test in January of 2013 showed the tempera-ture to be in the 90s. There is a light called a “good day indica-tor” that tells employees that the outdoor environment is within the tolerances for bringing in outdoor air. On those days, shoebox-shaped windows – nicknamed “poppers” – open hydraulically on the exterior wall of the building. This allows fresh air to enter the 30-inch cavity be-tween the outer and inner exterior walls. Vents are located at the bottom of the inner glass wall that let fresh air into the building’s interior. PNC employees have the option of opening a five-foot sliding door to increase the air flow.

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There is a light called a “good day indicator” that tells employees that the outdoor environment is within the tolerances for bringing in outdoor air. On those days, shoebox-shaped windows – nicknamed “poppers” – open hydraulically on the exterior wall of the building.


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PNC wants its employees to have the discretion to open the doors on the inner wall on so-called “good days” but there are provisions for keeping the envelope sealed when outside conditions don’t allow for natural ventilation. Contacts on each door tell the building engineer which doors have been opened and must be closed. “For the employee, that will be a bad day,” jokes Saulson. The Tower’s air is conditioned through convection without the use of variable air volume boxes. In a conventional design, The Tower would have thousands of VAV box-es moving air throughout the inte-rior. Buro Happold’s design for The Tower utilizes the solar chimney to heat air at the top of the building. During warmer periods, the hot air vents through the top of the build-ing, drawing cooler air in from the outside and up the solar shaft as it warms. In colder conditions, the so-lar chimney is used to preheat air that is circulated back into the build-ing by fans. Hot weather air-conditioning is done with chilled beams, which are pipes in the ceiling that use chilled recy-cled water to cool the individual of-fices similar to how radiant heating warms a space. The complexity of the mechanical solution and the building’s systems impacted nearly every specialty con-tractors’ scope. PJ Dick’s project ex-ecutive, Walter Czekaj, has decades of experience and was the senior executive on the construction of the CONSOL Energy Center. This proj-ect presented dozens of new chal-lenges to him. “One thing I had never built was a project with a solar shaft. The solar shaft runs from the fourth floor right up through to the top of the build-ing,” Czekaj explains. “Each shaft is 400 square feet and it has to be built so that there is absolutely no air leakage. Easley & Rivers (the core and shell drywall subcontractor) was required to seal and test the shafts every five floors to make sure there


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were no leaks. That’s not so bad when you’re doing the first one and you have a base on the fourth floor and have to go up to nine and put a ceiling in to test it; but when you’re doing [floors] 20 to 25 and you have all those floors below you, the shaft is pretty substantial and it becomes much more challenging. E & R did a great job.” As can be imagined, the building’s systems were of particular complexity for the project’s mechanical and electrical contracting teams, which were led by McKamish Inc. and Lighthouse Elec-

tric. To begin with, the coordination of the multiple trades within the building’s systems was extraordinary. To optimize water flow through the system, the engineers encouraged the use of 45 de-gree fittings where possible, which made the elimination of clash-es a little more difficult. Then too, the automated nature of one of the mechanical system’s key elements – the poppers – depended on nearly silent electric motors. “The uniqueness of the exterior curtain wall system was more difficult to design, fabricate and construct than I think anyone

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The two-story Neighborhood offers space for informal work or socializing. Photo courtesy PNC Financial Services Group.

Each floor has a conference room known as the Inner Circle. Photo courtesy PNC Financial Services Group.



expected,” offers Jeff Turconi, PJ Dick’s president. “Those chal-lenges certainly put schedule pressure on the job. The number and complexity of those windows that popped had never been done before. It looks simple when those windows go out but there are six separate motors on each and if they’re not exactly in synch the windows bind up. So the energy and the pulses have to be synched perfectly for those windows to go in or out properly.” “You wouldn’t think that the mechanical system would impact the electrical so much,” notes Todd Mikec, president of Light-

house Electric. “We had motors that had to work with the curtain wall sys-tem but you weren’t supposed to see any wires. We certainly learned a lot on this project.” “One thing that was probably more difficult than we expected it to be was the MEP coordination,” says Turconi. “Our BIM guys, led by our BIM man-ager, Matt Baker, were remarkable and I mean the whole BIM team of us, Light-house, McKamish and Preferred Fire Protection, did a great job getting ev-erything to fit.”

The PJ Dick key team members also included Bob Meadway as general superintendent, Dean Marraccini as MEP coordinator, Matt Wetzel as senior project manager, Jeff Thorla doing contract administration, Bob Simpson as fitout superintendent, and Wes Erskine as exterior wall “guru.” There were many other project engineers, safety personnel, assistant superintendents, project coordinators and administrators that rounded out the PJ Team. Both Turconi and Czekaj point to the logistics of the project as an ongoing challenge. The tight site limited access to the project for

Part of the indoor park located on the 28th floor of The Tower. Photo courtesy PNC Financial Services Group.


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suppliers. Vertical transportation was very difficult, as subcontrac-tors and suppliers vied for access to the single tower crane that ran almost around the clock. “We had over 2,500 people work on the project and we probably peaked at 650. To get that number of people up through the building and get materials delivered, it was challenging,” says Czekaj.

Site logistics were complicated by the fact that there were ongoing and upcoming projects in close proximity to the building throughout the project. And Czekaj noted that keeping the neighbors happy was a full-time concern. “Maybe the biggest challenge of the entire project was timeliness of deliveries because for some things PNC would delay their decisions for as long as possible so that they could en-sure that they were getting the latest technol-ogy,” recalls Czekaj. “Because of the lengthy duration of the project, if PNC had made their decisions early in the project products or tech-nology could have been outdated before it

was actually installed. The timeliness of when that would get ap-proved, when it would get here and when it would have to get onto the floor was critical. The team did a great job communicat-ing and managing this process successfully.”

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Natural ventilation will result from convection as the hot air within the solar chimney rises and draws in out-side air from the “popper” windows. Image courtesy Gensler.


Czekaj notes that the team, Mike Gilmore, senior vice president of construction services, and John Robinson, director of devel-opment services for PNC, was easy to work with. “That was what was good about it. You could trust that if you gave them the date for certain decisions, they made them on or before that date because they had good people that understood that it had to happen if we were going to keep everything on track.” It’s ironic, however, that when asked about problems during the construction of The Tower, Czekaj doesn’t have much to offer. “Construction went pretty much as planned. There were some de-sign issues that changed some of those plans but from a construc-tion and sequencing point of view everything went pretty well.” The Tower at PNC Plaza was turned over on schedule and under budget. The contract was structured so that PJ Dick delivered a guaranteed maximum price with a contingency prior to con-struction. As complex as the project was, a significant portion of the contingency will be returned to the owner when the project closes out. “The real pat on the back goes to the team – Walt and the gang – because we managed our way through that complex project with fewer problems and issues than what we might have on a more traditional project,” notes Turconi. “I think it was because

we planned the heck out of the thing. We planned it well. We had a good schedule, a realistic budget and had very good subs that knew what they were doing.” Doug Gensler seems especially proud that the completed building met the goals that were set at the start of the planning process. “The form of it is all about performance. When we talk about performance we really want to make sure that we recognize that it’s not just energy performance but it’s also the performance of the people and the performance of the building as a contributor to its context,” Gensler states. “Often times buildings are de-signed and selected based upon an image of a building. I think at the end of the day every move on this project was extraordi-narily intentional and rationalized around supporting the strate-gic goals of this project. The floor plate, the top, the articulation of the mass was all about delivering a piece of architecture that strives to deliver on its promise for the employees, for the city, for the environment.” Jeff Turconi believes all the time spent planning was how such a complicated project became a successful one. While he knows that the same planning effort doesn’t go into all projects, he wonders what the industry might be like if it did.


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Photo by Connie Zhou Photography. Use courtesy Gensler.

PROJECT TEAMThe PNC Financial Services Group ..............................................OwnerPJ Dick Inc..................................................... Construction ManagerGensler ................................................................................... ArchitectBuro Happold..........Structural-Mechanical-Electrical EngineerPaladino & Co..........................................Sustainability ConsultantMcKamish Inc. ...........................................................HVAC-PlumbingLighthouse Electric ................................................................ElectricalPreferred Fire Protection ............................................Fire SprinklersKalkreuth Roofing & Sheet Metal .............................................. RoofingA. C. Dellovade Inc. ........................................ Exterior Metal PanelsAutomated Logic Contracting Services ................. Building ControlsCentury Steel Erectors..................................................Steel ErectionEasley & Rivers Inc. .........................................Core & Shell DrywallFranco Associates....................................................................MasonryGiffin Interior & Fixture Inc. ..................................................CaseworkNoralco Corporation .................................... Demolition-ExcavationPermasteelisa North America Corp. ............. Curtain Wall-WindowsPeter J. Caruso & Sons................................................Asphalt PavingSchindler Elevator Corp. ........................................................ ElevatorsT. D. Patrinos Painting & Contracting......................................PaintingWyatt Inc. ........................................... Fireproofing-Tenant DrywallWright Commercial Flooring.................................................... Flooring


“Do we try to plan every project? Do we try to have good solid GMP with a reasonable contingency? Do we try to have good subs with good collaboration with the design team?” asks Turconi. “Yes. It’s the simple, tried and true formula for success. Unfortunately, it doesn’t always happen for many and varied reasons. When I think of some other projects that really worked - CON-SOL Arena, UPMC East, 3 PNC, Bakery Square - all those pieces are there: getting the team together early, working closely with the de-sign team, having a good budget, planning it completely, having a realistic schedule, having the right contingency, an owner that under-stands the importance of making timely decisions and bringing the right subs on. Why do we wonder why those jobs go well?” he laughs. To Gary Saulson, the biggest ac-complishment was in managing the complexity of what is a one-of-a-kind building. “This is something that nobody’s ever dealt with before. That’s why communications among the team members was so important. There were weekly project meetings and there were frequent sub-group meetings so there was an engineer-ing meeting, a constructability meet-ing and so on. We really encouraged an ongoing dialogue so if you had an important issue you didn’t wait for the meeting,” he says. Gensler agrees. “The mindset was set at the very beginning that we are in this as a team. We’re going to innovate together. It was not about pushing risk to anyone in particular. It was about acknowledging that the aspiration for this project was very high. We knew that it would take a great team working together to make that happen.” BG


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