Industry News

Nokia’s 135,000-sf facility in San Diego’s Scripps Northridge Corporate Center has a new space plan and design for tenant improvements, thanks to the work of Austin Veum Robbins Parshalle of San Diego, in association with Divan+Studio.The shell and core of the new facility, completed in September 2000, was designed by a collaboration of Davis & Davis Architecture and McGraw/Baldwin Architects. The general contractor is Hensel Phelps Construction Co.   Interiors for the project were done by DPR Construction.

SAP AG, the German producer of business software, plans to expand its American operations headquarters at its Newtown Square campus. Construction of 700,000 sf of office space will include three centers: the SAP Global Solutions Center, the SAP Institute for Innovation and Development, and the SAP Partner E-Business Center. Currently, 1,500 people are employed at the site; the expansion will accommodate an additional 600 staff. Completion is anticipated in late 2002.

Applied Biosystems Group, based in Foster City, Calif., plans to develop a 960,000-sf Pleasanton campus over the next eight years that will eventually house as many as 2,600 employees. Applied Biosystems will initially occupy about 100,000 sf of the 300,000 sf of office, lab, and warehouse space that currently exists at the 80-acre site. In 2001, the company plans to build between 250,000 and 300,000 sf of office, lab, light manufacturing, and warehouse space. The company is working to decode the human genome.

Human Genome Sciences hopes to relocate its 600 employees from Rockville, Md., to a 45-acre headquarters in North Potomac. Preliminary plans for the new campus: a 400,000-sf to 500,000-sf initial build-out, with the potential for up to one million sf. Pending approval by the Montgomery County Planning Board in July, final relocation plans will be ready by fall. Construction could begin by summer 2001, with move-in sometime in 2003. Head-count at the facility could reach 2,500 over the next several years.

Johns Hopkins University recently dedicated the new 50,000-gsf Academic and Research Building for its Montgomery County campus at the Shady Grove Life Sciences Center in Rockville. The three-story structure features state-of-the-art research and education facilities: four computer labs; 22 "smart" classrooms configured for video conferencing, multimedia presentations, and high-speed transmission of large databases; a coffee house; a bookstore; and student meeting spaces.