Industry News

The University of Maryland has selected Bethesda-based Clark Construction as the general contractor for the $39-million Jeong H. Kim engineering building located on the school’s College Park campus. Designed by Oudens+Knopp/SmithGroup, the facility will house 22 labs for research and education in environmental engineering, transportation systems, and space research. The Kim building is slated for completion in December 2004.

Waveworks Digital Media has relocated from Arlington to an 8,000-sf facility in McLean, Va. The twenty-year-old facility accommodates the post production shop’s fifteen employees and includes video suites, a music production facility, two audio rooms, and a music library.

Roswell, N.M.-based Strategic Data Systems is developing a facility capable of hosting 1 million gigabytes of data in in two former Atlas F nuclear missile silos. Comprising 1.2 million sf, the 22-floor facility will have 100 servers on each floor. The massive computer storage system will be protected by a structure built to withstand most natural and manmade disasters, and features four-foot-thick concrete walls, 4,000-pound steel doors, and a diesel-powered backup generator. The silos will employ sixty workers once operational.

Software firm PeopleSoft is constructing a 180,000-sf facility on 20 acres in Pleasanton, Calif. The $45-million project is expected to reach completion in the third quarter of 2003.

Biodynamic Research Corp. (BRC) will lease 38,000 sf in a new 70,045-sf single-story tech building in San Antonio. Ground was recently broken on the facility, the second phase of the University Heights Tech Center, by developer R.L. Worth and Associates of San Antonio. The building will feature a high degree of office finish-out and large floorplates, as well as a high parking ratio: 6.16 cars per 1,000 rentable square feet. BRC is a professional services and research firm and a leading consultant in biodynamics research.