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Area Development - Site Selection, Facility Planning and Workforce Development

Burns & McDonnell Opens Anchor Facility At Its Kansas City, Missouri, Campus

05/19/2016
Burns & McDonnell opened its new four-story, 310,000 square foot anchor building, on a 17.5-acre site adjacent to its famed Ward Parkway corridor in Kansas City, Missouri.

According to the firm, the structure is the third building on the firm's 37-acre campus and increases the its world headquarters by 74 percent, “accommodating 1,400 additional employee-owners."

"This is much more than a nice new building," says Greg Graves, Chairman/CEO, Burns & McDonnell. "It's our identity. We intentionally designed it to mirror the values and principles of Burns & McDonnell. For example, the glass wall around the first floor symbolizes our transparency as a firm. The open design and unique gathering stations illustrate our passion for partnership and collaboration. And hand-selected amenities illustrate our commitment to our employee-owners and making Burns & McDonnell the best place to work."

The design team prioritized amenities that support a work-life balance. One of the most anticipated features is the MacKids Learning Academy. The 20,000-square-foot child care center has capacity for 144 preschool-aged children with a focus on science, technology, engineering and math education.

Other key amenities include: a 2,500-square-foot rooftop event space, a 250-seat auditorium with advanced audiovisual equipment, 60 conference rooms and four large training rooms and areas customized with whiteboards and expansive counter space circling each floor designed to inspire and accommodate varied styles of collaboration sessions.

According to company officials, the expansion project spanned 17 months, required 345,000 man-hours for completion and had zero safety incidents. The project team credits the integrated design-build delivery method for staying within the $85 million budget. Uniquely Burns & McDonnell, integrated design-build is an approach in which one team of architects, engineers, constructors and other professionals work collaboratively to see that all project details are executed to perfection from conception to occupancy.

"Changes always happen during a project and typically those can mean added costs," says Lori Top, the Burns & McDonnell architect who led the design team. "Having an agile design-build team allowed us to make better cost decisions early in the project. We maximized the money we saved and put it towards areas that provide the most value to employee-owners, such as the pharmacy and the barista coffee bar. That's the beauty of integrated design-build."

"The Burns & McDonnell expansion project has become a model of how to do commercial projects," says David Harrison, President of VanTrust Real Estate that served as both the client and partner for the project. "We regularly toured clients and colleagues through the project during construction to have them experience the energy and efficiency of the job in action. We count on projects to exceed our expectations and arrive on budget, and this one hit the mark and then some."

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