Cerner Innovations, Building 1024
INFORMATION :
Under Construction / Kansas City, Missouri / 805,000 sq. ft.
INVOLVEMENT :
Co-Architectural Design Lead / Co-Lead Master Planner
PROJECT DESCRIPTION :
Cerner’s next-generation workplace, the Cerner Innovations Campus, is a centerpiece of the company’s strategy to draw top technology industry talent to the Kansas City, MO area, employing design as a key tactic to create a desirable working culture and facilitate growth. This 4.7 million sf, $4.45 billion master planned campus is being constructed on the 290 acre site of an abandoned retail district in Kansas City, Missouri. It is master planned to accommodate 16,000 employees when fully built out. Missouri’s governor has labeled it the “largest economic development project in Missouri history” based on the amount of money it will cost and the number of jobs it will create.
How is Cerner attracting talent to the heart of the country – talent that might consider Silicon Valley? Salary and stock options are not the only factors motivating these employees. Many care deeply about doing something meaningful, work that makes a difference instead of working on the next video game or killer app.
Working at Cerner offers them opportunities to make an impact on the future of healthcare. As such, Gould Evans is designing the Innovations Campus to fit Cerner’s culture. “We’ve approached the site as a metaphor for the multilayered, personal journey everyone takes through the health care landscape,” said Gould Evans’ Principal, Anthony Rohr, AIA. “This new campus takes its name from the innovations that occur when human knowledge is in dialogue with nature. This concept is expressed in the way the campus buildings touch the land and integrate with the landscape.” With this vision, the road entering from 87th street to the north, will be titled Health Care Rd. and the road entering from the south will be Technology Way. The intersection of the two roads places the main campus buildings at the intersection of health care and technology, a metaphor commonly used to describe Cerner’s work and the company’s vision.
“As construction progresses, we’re beginning to build the brand of the campus. We want each element to reflect our culture and Cerner as a whole. We’re a company that focuses on the future, improving health care and creating technology. These updates better represent Cerner as we continue to fulfill our mission to improve health and care both globally and here in Kansas City,” said Chief Operating Officer for Cerner, Mike Nill.
Cerner’s focus on the connectivity of health care and technology is embedded into the design of the campus as a whole. The design solution uses binary coding and DNA sequencing to create a pattern integrated in all scales of the campus and the buildings, revealing the unique nature of health care. This pattern can be seen in small details like tiling and concrete paving, and larger, attention-grabbing details, including:
• A campus greeting sign carved from the landscape and perforated with an embedded binary code
• A stairwell – known as The Founder’s Stair – located in the main entry between the two towers and perforated with binary code to reveal quotes from Cerner founders
• A 188-foot tall façade covering the outside of tower one and modeled after DNA
The campus’ building numbering sequence will also follow this pattern and represent powers of two, which are common in computer science and mathematics. They will range from 21, a bit, to 213 , with the main campus address as 2 10 , or 1024, which is known as a kilobit.
The first towers are still on schedule to open early 2017. It will be Cerner’s seventh Kansas City area campus and is the largest economic development project in the history of the state. The development is expected to create nearly 16,000 new jobs over 10 years.
Beyond this new campus, Cerner Co-Founder and Vice Chairman Cliff Illig is leading nonprofit initiative EnterpriseKC, which will study how to make the Kansas City area more productive for existing entrepreneurs and more inviting to outside talent and companies.
Phases 1 and 2, and the Link building are the first in a series of buildings on the new Innovations Campus located southeast of downtown Kansas City, Missouri. These buildings are part of a collection of office towers for Cerner’s expanded Intellectual Properties group. The Link is a shared space for associates working within the office towers as well as a client presentation space. The two primary pieces of program that make up the Link include dining and conferencing spaces. Intertwining the sharing of a meal with the sharing of knowledge the Link is hub for collaboration and the exchange of ideas; particularly the way the Intellectual Property group teams and collaborates. “Initially we talked with them about employing the often-predictable open office setting, but we realized that it didn’t fully fit the users’ needs. Their associates would have used those spaces for socialization, but they probably would have gone somewhere else—maybe home—to get their ‘real work’ done. That’s not what we wanted. We needed to know much more” said Gould Evans Principal Anthony Rohr. “We observed the IP group’s behavior in their current space, an existing building with long, narrow floor plates. Their software engineers need “heads-down” space to work on complex problems, but they come together frequently in pre-arranged “scrums” to compare progress, collaborate and advance ideas. If an employee has to traverse long hallways and multiple floors to attend a scrum, often he/she forgoes attendance or simply calls in – the perceived distance is too
great.”
The Innovations Campus design responds by grouping pairs of floors into neighborhoods, and breaking down their scale in various ways. Each neighborhood joined by a connecting atrium called a “node.” These nodes are differentiated spaces that enable innovation, teamwork and recreation. They include a library, maker space, large project rooms, a game room with vintage arcade-style video games and board games, and a flexible work space called the “think tank” which can support sustained teamwork. The nodes give each group of floors a distinct personality and each employee the option of work spaces and amenities that fit his/her working style.
The first buildings at the Innovations Campus also includes spaces that facilitate more active collaboration with clients, as compared to the Continuous Campus. This caters to a younger generation of clients, who are increasingly interested in understanding the engineers’ thought processes behind a solution. At Innovations, “the back of house is the front of house.” Client meeting spaces are located adjacent to team work areas, with permeability between the two.
The two towers are accessed via a large vertical connector building which houses the double-height main lobby, as well as a double-height meeting space. The connector is designed to perform as the cartilage between the two towers of associates. The space is flexible enough to serve as hosting space, tour stop, reception venue, group meeting venue and casual teaming environment. It is a piazza environment that can either be a place or a space between places.
MORE ON THIS PROJECT:
Project Synopsis (Gould Evans website):
Kansas City Business Journal Article:
http://goo.gl/joFGj5
IMAGES:
Courtesy of Gould Evans