New building brings researchers to campus
Triangle Business Journal - by Mark Hilpert
R ESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK -- Research Triangle Institute is building a 30,000-square-foot building to expand existing office space and move scientists and other research workers scattered throughout Research Triangle Park with their colleagues at the main campus.
The institute, a non-profit contract research firm focused on health and medicine, high technology, public policy and the environment, is headquartered off Highway 54 on a 160-acre campus of laboratories and offices. The campus has 455,000 square feet of space.
The building, which can later be expanded by another 60,000 square feet, is under construction. It's designed to provide badly needed multi-purpose conference and meeting facilities in addition to standard office space, said RTI spokesman Reid Maness.
Maness declined to reveal the building's cost. At $110 to $120 per square foot, a fairly typical cost for area office buildings, it would cost about $3 million to $3.5 million.
The institute has about 1,275 people in the Triangle. Of those, about 275 are in rented offices away from the main site. The building will enable about 100 to be housed at the main campus.
"We lack meeting places that are built from the start with multi-media in mind," Maness said.
Maness said RTI has employees at the Imperial Center and in Downtown Durham but will likely move some personnel to the new building.
Maness also stressed that new construction is not an indication of a different direction for RTI's operations. "This represents a facility improvement, not a new business venture," he said.
Deciding to go ahead with the new building also made good business sense. Even though the initial capital outlay will be large, RTI already owned the improved land and the consolidation will decrease slightly the overall price per square foot that the company pays, he said.
Maness said Institute's management contemplated the move for less than a year before making the decision to build. The new building, slated to be finished by late 1998, will be located roughly in the middle of the campus's 17 other buildings.
A Charlotte architecture firm, TBA2, is handling the project, the latest of several the firm has completed for RTI.
Latest News |
