Hackberry Yard Offices, Austin

This sample shows how we approach a typical speculative office building in Austin; its figures are representative, not taken from a real building. Three storeys of about 54,000 sq ft: a lobby, two retail shells and a restaurant-ready shell on the ground floor, and two open office floors above, with a surface car park. The shell has to be ready for tenants who are not yet known, so the services are sized and routed to leave each space easy to fit out.

Mechanical: rooftop packaged VAV units of about 150 tons in all, with VAV boxes and electric reheat on the office floors, economizers for the mild months, and dehumidification for Austin's humid summers; the restaurant shell has a route for a grease duct and Type I hood exhaust and a make-up air provision. Electrical: a 2,000 A, 480/277 V service with a meter for each retail tenant, LED lighting with occupancy and daylight controls as the energy code requires, and EV-ready parking spaces. Plumbing: a restroom core on every floor, domestic water and gas to the restaurant shell, and a grease interceptor before the city sewer. Fire protection: an NFPA 13 wet sprinkler system and an addressable fire alarm. We prepared the COMcheck energy compliance and the mechanical, electrical, plumbing and sprinkler sets for the building permit.