Wednesday, March 04, 2009

New Office


We’ve been there for a month now, but I thought I should still share the news. My company (Spectrum Engineers) moved from the Historic [piece of crap] Walker Center (see picture above) on the corner of 2nd South and Main Street to a 5 story red brick building on the corner of State Street and 3rd South (the old location of Auerbach’s Department Store). At the Walker Center my company had 4 floors and we will now all share the same floor at the new building. In addition, our space is going for LEED Platinum (the highest possible honor, and only one other building project has been certified as such in Utah so far). Basically, this means that our new office space is about as environmentally friendly as is possible. The carpets are 70% recycled materials, the furniture is either recycled or made from renewable bamboo, the lighting is state-of-the-art (LEDs, daylighting and extensive occupancy sensor control), and all of the mechanical equipment is of the highest efficiency. The offices are quite a bit smaller (but they were really big at the Walker Center) and there is a lot more collaboration/conferencing space. Many of the employees were looking forward to moving from the Walker Center, but had a lot to complain about in the new space. Now that we have been there a month, I think that most of us like the new space quite a bit. So far, the downsides are that the bathrooms aren’t finished yet (we’ve got to trek down to the second floor) and a bunch of the other rooms and areas still have workers trekking through them. I also quite enjoyed having my 10th floor office overlooking Main Street. It’s more exciting than State Street. Did I mention I love my job?

My old office:

New office:

3 comments:

JTENMAN said...

The walker center is really nice on the floors they've redone. They are in the process of completely gutting floor 10 and redoing it now. Glad to hear you like the new space.

tysqui said...

I'm actually not giving the Walker Center a fair shake because I really liked it there and they have upgraded most of the building to Class A office space.

Regardless, we often had employees get stuck in the elevators, the fire alarm would go off randomly, all of the radiators hissed and leaked and every office required a space heater because the windows wouldn't seal properly. Add to that, they wanted to increase our rent by a huge amount (and they already increased parking costs by almost 40%) and it was time to look elsewhere. The only things that bothered me were the rent and parking rate increases because they come directly out of my pocket. The rest of the stuff wasn't really an issue to me (but it sure was to the rest of the company).

Tim said...

The old office sure looked alot bigger, but I am sure the new office feels much more up to date then your old office