Form to Market

By Rob Patterson

Flexibility Key in Whole Foods New World Headquarters

Whole Foods Market is an Austin institution that has grown from a cramped single store to an international chain branded as the gold standard in natural and organic foods.

The company was started by natural-food entrepreneurs John Mackey, Craig Waller and Mark Skiles in 1980 in a one-story box at Lamar Boulevard and Ninth Street on an occasionally drenched flood plain. It migrated three blocks uphill in the early 1990s and into a new corporate headquarters and sleek flagship store at Lamar and Sixth Street.

Now the burgeoning Whole Foods Market operation is jumping one block farther south into a 280,000-sq.-ft. showplace supermarket and six-story office building that signals its status as the leader in its field.

Flexibility has been a byword of the quest to provide Whole Foods Market with what it calls its "landmark" supermarket - the largest of its 162 stores in North America and Great Britain - as well as a state-of-the-art world headquarters.

A different project was originally planned for the site by Austin-based Schlosser Development Corp. for the property owner, Lamar Sixth Austin I Ltd.

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"We had a fully permitted different scheme for both that block and the block next to it," said Rick Duggan, director of design and construction for Schlosser. "It was to be a Target store under three levels of retail adjacent to a 1,700-car garage, all of which was to be under a 20-screen movie theater.

"For a variety of reasons, which included tenancies going bankrupt or choosing to take smaller spaces, that project stalled."

During the stall, which occurred in 2002, Schlosser got together with Whole Foods. "They approached us and everything started to make pretty good sense. I think we have a spectacular project for them," said Duggan, who added that the overall project will cost in the neighborhood of $50 million.

Schlosser will acquire the property Whole Foods is vacating, and the company will develop the multiblock area around the new Whole Foods headquarters as a "Market District."

Integrating the needs and vision of Whole Foods into a new project wasn't easy. "It's almost a Rubik's cube," said Owen McCrory, design architect for HKS Inc. of Dallas. What they are trying to do is stack a 200,000-sq.-ft. corporate headquarters on top of an 80,000-sq.-ft. store, which then sits on top of 800 parking spaces-all on one city block in a relatively urban area."

The team has numerous principal players. The Austin office of Hensel Phelps, which is headquartered in Greeley, Colo., is the shell contractor; two divisions of White Construction of Austin are finishing out the store and the office tower. Whole Foods holds a long-term lease on all but one of the office floors and had substantial user input. The company engaged CDM/Project Managers of Watsonville, Calif., to oversee the project.

There were revisions as the planning and construction progressed. "There have been quite a few significant changes on this project," said Kevin Karr, project manager for Hensel Phelps. "The design was an evolving process."

"Working with the creativity and input from the Whole Foods people as a tenant has generated a lot of tweaks and interactions: 'Add a skylight, move a parapet, work through this equipment location, add a mezzanine for our refrigeration equipment,'" Duggan said. "In many aspects it has become a build-to-suit."

For Hensel Phelps, the initial excavation phase of its $38 million building project presented the toughest hurdles after the May 2003 groundbreaking. To accommodate the three-level cast-in-place concrete underground parking garage, crews had to "dig 40 ft. down into solid limestone" Karr said. "We had about 150,000 cu. yds. of material come out of the hole, and three-quarters of it was limestone."

Austin-based Ranger Excavation brought out the heavy equipment. "Ranger had several Caterpillar D11's out there, rock saws, milling machines and three or four track hoes with hoe rams, all ripping rock and taking it out one piece at a time," Karr said. Compounding the challenges was access to the site. Removals and deliveries had to be woven through commuter traffic. A utility and road reconstruction project was under way simultaneously along Lamar Boulevard. "We did all our concrete placements at night so we wouldn't be trying to bring hundreds of concrete trucks to the job site," Karr said.

About 29,000 cu. yds. of concrete was poured for the garage and foundation.

Above the ground, the structural-steel frame was fortunately purchased prior to the 2003 price hikes. "But there were some problems getting light-gauge metal-stud framing," Karr said. The skin it frames above the first level is a mix of terracotta-style tan-and-slate exterior-installation-finish system and nonreflective glass. "Our plan was to build the skin of the office up, but we're building it top down," he added. "We resequenced so we could get the roof on and top floors dried in."

The top two floors feature all-glass window walls, which helped the contractor overcome the framing hitch.

"Hensel Phelps had the foresight to build in a Fraco exterior scaffold lift system," Duggan said. "So the delay in the studs didn't hurt us badly because the contractor had already built in flexibility with staging and the scaffolding system. Top down became the order of the day."

HKS developed specific approaches for the office building to make it work in harmony with the store below and the site. "What we've created is a very large footprint building," architect McCrory said. "It's more than 2000,000 sq. ft. We wanted to make sure that large footprint didn't dominate over the store."

Whole Foods employee input called for outside light and views. The solution, introduced after planning and design, is an L-shaped tower with the elevator bank, stairwell and an HVAC, utility and plumbing shaft at the juncture of the L. The absence of interior walls means that "no work area is more than 45 ft. from a window," Duggan said.

Top-to-bottom curtain walls grace the office structure's corners. The largest of them adjoins the office tower's two-story entrance on Sixth Street. The office tower also features a modular raised-floor system with the HVAC delivery and utilities running underneath that gives each worker an individual air vent control at his or her desk.

It is estimated that the design will result in a 30 percent savings on air-conditioning costs. And the flexibility of the modular system with its plug-and-play electrical connections allows Whole Foods to easily reconfigure office space in the future.

On the ground level, stucco and Leuters limestone clad the building. The storefront facing Lamar features a "market hall" and a gently curved entryway with a window wall that mixes clear panels with yellow, green and blue tinted panes.

Another aspect added as the building developed was the variety of store access options to and from the parking garage. Elevators, escalators and stairs carry shoppers into the store. A moving sidewalk at an approximately 30-degree incline with a magnetic system to secure shopping carts allows customers to wheel their purchases to their parking spaces. Or shoppers can choose to have their groceries transported down by conveyor and loaded into their vehicles.

A plaza leading to the storefront also offers 115 spaces of surface parking and features live tree plantings, tree-shaped trellises, shaded outdoor dining areas, a simulated Hill Country stream and a pick-your-own herb garden.

Another public plaza sits atop the store, reached by a stairway graced with more plantings and shade structures. And in typical Austin fashion, there's also a performance stage.