Knightdale Gateway Building 1

Summarize the project's program, features and achievements?

Knightdale Building One is a 289,632 sf square foot shipping and receiving industrial warehouse. The building boasts a 50’-5” tall fin panel, with two-story glazing at the entry features. This building demonstrates the latest tilt-up concrete technology and capabilities with a strong reveal design, ceramic tile accents, ACM wrapped canopies, and louvered sunshades with vertical fins, and ACM wrapped concrete tilt-up fin panels with recessed LED strip lighting both on the face of panels and side of panels. Due to its site constraints, a portion of the building is offset, which allowed to create three primary entry features on a façade that would normally only accommodate three. The architectural language demonstrates relief through varying heights of the panels, panel overlaps, and the asymmetrical reveal and hierarchy of the paint pattern. The building design evokes a sense of place through displaying both bold accent colors/ dark window mullions and warm/natural neutral colors marrying the concepts of current design trends and the history of Knightdale together. The ceramic tile pattern exhibits a metallic patina finish nodding to the history of the area as a manufacturing region.

What obstacles were overcome related to the schedule, budget, program, specification, site, etc., on this project?

Significant challenges were encountered on this project, which started with an existing power line that ran through the middle of the building. This delayed relocation, by the local power company, resulted in a four-month delay. Rock removal in order to reach the building’s subgrade could not begin until the relocation was completed. Blasting of the rocky subgrade resulted in a total of 22,864 cubic yards of blasted material and 50,894 cubic yards of rock being removed from the building pad, foundations, and utility trenches. Weather-related delays also impacted the schedule, with an average of 4.1 lost weather days per month.

Despite these setbacks, the collective team between the owner, the design team, and the general contractor, collaborated together, and we were able to bring the project to a successful completion four days ahead of schedule. Additionally, about one-third of the excavated rock was successfully crushed and reused on site for retaining wall backfill.

Please communicate any engineering complexities or unique features of the panel design for this project?

As this project was not a build-to-suit project for the existing tenant, the building was designed for maximum flexibility in the future. With various knock-out panels in place to create office entries at all corners and both centers of the shorter sides, storefront windows down both facades, and additional drive-in doors and overhead doors, the building is engineered to accommodate any user in the future. Due to the complexity of the main entry with the long spanning glazing/ spandrel panels, varying planes of tilt walls, and multiple materials, the architectural and engineering team worked together to achieve the desired sleek look successfully without losing the integrity of the initial design.