LEED Certified

 

Neumann/Smith was selected from a national search under GSA’s “Design Excellence Program” as the Lead Designer to renovate the first five floors and a portion of the lower level of an existing 10-story building, originally built in 1912 as a publishing facility for Rand McNally.  The renovation allowed the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Citizenship and Immigration Services, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the Customs and Border Patrol to consolidate operations from several leased locations in Chicago to one government-owned building.

 

Our design team worked closely with the Office of the Chief Architect of the GSA, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the State of Illinois, the City of Chicago, the Chicago Transit Authority, the Chicago Metra, and over 40 private immigration related organizations to develop a plan to accommodate the thousands of visitors and their families a day in pursuit of citizenship while meeting the need for separation of public traffic from DHS employee and investigative functions.  Security measures include decentralized access control, intrusion detection, digital video surveillance and recording as well as both passive and active counter-terrorism measures.

 

Sustainable design measures include air-to-air total energy recovery, installation of new premium efficiency motors and variable frequency drives on existing cooling towers, and the reconfiguration of the chilled water system into a true primary-secondary pumping system with the installation of new premium efficiency motors with variable frequency drives.  A third high efficiency chiller was added to the central plant to provide redundancy and high efficiency off-hours operations for a building where a third of the occupants require 24-hour operation.  A raised access floor for power, telephone, and data cabling and underfloor air distribution allow for greater occupant thermal comfort, greater flexibility in the layout of the office space and increased energy savings.

 

 

In association with HDR Architecture and Syska Hennessy Group