Fluor Settles In

New Campus Ready After Eight Months of Construction

With Fluor's relocation to Dallas, Texas now claims more FORTUNE 500 company headquarters than any other state, ahead of New York and California.

by Jennifer Duell

Koll Development Co. of Dallas helped Fluor Corp. find a site for its new corporate headquarters in the city of Irving’s Las Colinas community. (© John W. Davis, DVDesign Group Inc.)

An oversized iron horseshoe hangs on the exterior of Fluor Corp.'s new worldwide headquarters in suburban Dallas, alerting employees and visitors alike that the engineering and construction firm has fully embraced the traditions of its adopted state.

Top:Gensler served as the interior designer of the 136,000-sq.-ft. building, which includes many meeting spaces such as a 100-seat auditorium. (© John W. Davis, DVDesign Group Inc.) bottom: Forum Studio designed a full-height, all-glass atrium lobby that connects the office wings with a goal of achieving LEED certification. (© John W. Davis, DVDesign Group Inc.)

After being headquartered in Southern California for nearly a century, the Fortune 500 company, which boasted revenues of $13.2 billion in 2005, relocated its corporate headquarters to Las Colinas in late spring, roughly 12 months after it announced that it planned to leave its Aliso Viejo home for North Texas.

Fluor Chairman and CEO Alan Boeckmann said that the company chose the DFW Metroplex because of its proximity to key clients and financial and government centers. Moreover, he pointed to the region's central location and accessibility to international clients. Today, roughly 80 percent of the company's business is in Texas or on the East Coast, Boeckmann said, while business is growing in Europe and Asia.

Fluor has a lengthy and rich history that dates back to 1900 when the Fluor family immigrated to Wisconsin from Switzerland. What started out as a small sawmill business has grown into one of the biggest engineering and construction companies in the world.

Fluor's founder, Si Fluor Sr., moved his family and business to Santa Ana, Calif., in 1912 when the Orange County area was still overrun with orange trees. The company's first big jobs were in Los Angeles and the surrounding region, but by the 1930s, Fluor had expanded internationally, tackling its first project in the Persian Gulf.

The firm has been involved in some of the world's biggest engineering projects ranging from building cooling towers for the Manhattan Project to a $4 billion environmental cleanup in Ohio. The company, which counts giants such as Bechtel Corp. and Halliburton as competitors, is involved in the rebuilding of Iraq though the construction of the Khor Al Zubair Power Plant, which will provide energy for about 100,000 homes.

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Making a Statement Located on 26.8 acres near ExxonMobil, one of Fluor's largest customers, the new $53 million headquarters facility houses 180 top executives, while the rest of Fluor's 38,000 employees are scattered across the globe. The 136,000-sq.-ft. building, which was developed by Dallas-based Koll Development Co., is constructed of tilt-up concrete panels clad in natural Texas limestone with an interior boasting a three-story glass-enclosed atrium and high-end interior finishes such as custom millwork.

It includes a commercial kitchen and dining area, employee fitness center, 100-seat auditorium, multiple meeting rooms and a "history walk" depicting Fluor's 100-year past.

Forum Studio Inc. of St. Louis, Mo., designed the three-story, dual-wing office building to attain certification in the U.S. Green Building Council's Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design rating system. For example, all windows in the facility use high-performance glass, and the south- and west-facing windows have sunscreens to provide shading.

Standing in front of the oversized horseshoe that hangs on the building's exterior, Irving Mayor Herbert Gears (left) welcomes Fluor CEO Alan Boeckmann to Texas during the headquarters’ opening ceremony.

In addition, the glass wall on the amenities wing provides abundant natural light to cut electricity usage. The campus offers a two-story, covered parking structure and plenty of natural landscaping.

"Alan Boeckmann wanted our new headquarters to have a big Texas feel," said DeWitt Porter, vice president of operations for Fluor. Porter managed the development of the new headquarters and the company's relocation. "We wanted to make a statement so that when our clients and business partners come to DFW they can look at our building and know who we are."

Seeking a Space Fluor, which owned its 100,000-sq.-ft. headquarters facility in Aliso Viejo, initially planned to lease space for its new headquarters in the Metroplex because time was of the essence. "We wanted to move quickly so we were looking at existing facilities," Porter said.

He added that Boeckmann had mandated the relocation target date as April 24, 2006. "We wanted to move our employees and their families near the end of school rather than in the middle of the school year," Porter said.

top: The building's tilt-up concrete panels are clad in natural Texas limestone, while landscaping includes high-end plants. (Photo © John W. Davis, DVDesign Group Inc.) bottom: After hours, the three-story glass-enclosed atrium takes on an iridescent glow. (Photo © John W. Davis, DVDesign Group Inc.)

In addition to a tight timeline, Fluor was trying to find a headquarters location within the Metroplex that would provide an easy commute for employees and proximity to major transportation hubs and amenities such as restaurants and hotels, said Stuart Essery, director of real estate for Fluor. Essery, who supervised the search for the new headquarters facility and the disposition of the company's former building, said he soon realized that no existing space existed that would meet Fluor's size and quality criteria.

But, Porter said that he had serious doubts that a world-class facility could be developed from the ground up in less than 12 months.

With help from Cushman & Wakefield, a global real estate firm based in New York, Fluor evaluated several sites across the Metroplex and interviewed a number of developers including Koll Development Co., which eventually won the job. Initially, KDC proposed a site in north Irving; however, the site was small and "certainly not the best one that was out there," said Don Mills, senior vice president - design and construction for KDC.

Fortunately, the developer knew of another much larger site in a better location. KDC was marketing the land for Citigroup, which recently had completed a facility nearby.

"We looked at a variety of locations around Dallas area, but Irving/Las Colinas had some natural competitive advantages," Essery said. Specifically, Fluor was attracted to the abundance of hotels and restaurants the city offered, as well as its proximity to DFW International Airport. Moreover, the company believed that a Irving/Las Colinas location would be convenient to employees across the Metroplex.

Once Fluor settled on the Citigroup site and closed the land acquisition, the team immediately went to work on modifying the basic design that KDC had proposed as part of the bidding process. "Fluor wanted a high-end finish for both the interior and exterior," and timing required that the building be tilt-wall construction, Mills said.

However, Fluor didn't want its new facility to have the appearance of a tilt-wall building so KDC and Forum Studio proposed a natural limestone cladding and added a full-height, all-glass atrium lobby that connects the office wings. Additionally, the campus' landscaping budget was kicked up to nearly $3 million to include high-end plants and a stone retaining wall.

"There was a popular misconception in the market that this was an unlimited budget, but that was not true," Mills said. "We did a fast, but thorough value-engineering exercise."

Cinderella Project The project broke ground on July 30, 2005, with Clayco Construction of St. Louis, Mo., serving as the general contractor. To stay on schedule, Clayco and KDC brought on an outside scheduler to plan the project.

"We literally had the projected manhours included in the schedule," Mills said.

The development team purchased key items early on in the process, particularly the glass that was needed to construct the atrium. "Getting the glass integrated into the architecture was important," Mills said. "A lot of elements of the curtain wall are pretty long-lead so we chose a subcontractor early on." Local subcontractor Oak Cliff Mirror & Glass handled the job.

The remainder of the work was put out for bid, and Mills said the development team told all subcontractors to include any overtime labor or accelerated fabrication labor in their bids to make sure that they could meet the deadlines.

The development team, along with 45 subcontractors, worked nearly every weekend - and day and night toward the end of the project - to meet the completion target date, Porter said. "We all knew the sense of urgency - even down to the laborers," he added. On an average day, Clayco had 330 workers onsite, and Forum also had someone onsite to provide immediate architectural assistance.

Fluor's new headquarters received its Certificate of Occupancy on March 30, eight days ahead of the early completion date called for in the contract and after approximately eight months of construction.

"This headquarters was kind of a Cinderella project," Porter said. "Everything went right - we met the budget and we met the schedule."