Burns & McDonnell is in the process of building three mid-rise towers at the Overland One location in south Kansas City.
the design phase was still in its infancy, is the perfect calling card. The company gives building tours to a broad range of clients and po- tential clients that span each of the firm’s business divisions. Visitors include dozens of Fortune 500 companies, developers, members of the Design-Build Institute of America (DBIA), the Kansas City AIA, com- munity and civic groups, company alumni, building product manufac- turers, and even high school and college students. That’s a new chapter for a company historically associated with the construction of power plants and refineries. Indeed, the headquarters expansion helped land the job for Overland One, a 14.3-acre, south Kansas City development that will build-out to three mid-rise, Class- A towers totaling 350,000 square feet. One tower has already been completed and sold to Creative Planning, a wealth management firm; a second tower is under construction and a third has yet to be started. Burns & McDonnell also recently won an important contract for a global company, the details of which could not be disclosed as of press time. But, according to Burns & McDonnell, they went into the RFP process as underdogs and walked out as winners. “We kind of threw them for a loop when we proposed,” Schaefer said. Architect Clint Blew, RA, the lead designer for the Burns & McDon- nell headquarters expansion, has the same assessment of the win. “I’d
like to think we weren’t the favorites going in,” Blew said.
Blew, who has 20 years of experience on the design-bid-build side of the industry, said that through design-build, not as many problems reach the owner’s desk. Among the design-build team, there’s still plenty of hair-pulling, he said, but not as much as what happens between the design firm and the building firm under the traditional delivery method. “I’ve seen the gamut,” Blew said. “I can see the value in [design-build] because I did something else for 20 years. The other side is not all bad, but I wouldn’t go back to it if I didn’t have to.” As Burns & McDonnell continues to make its way in the design-build space — and as it eyes another major expansion at its world headquar- ters that would see an additional 142,000 square feet to accommodate as many as 800 employees — anecdotal evidence and industry research show that design-build, in general, is on a dramatic upswing. From a Shake Shack in Dallas to the San Francisco International Air- port, from a High Tech High School in New Jersey to student housing at the University of California, Irvine, and from highway widening
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june 2018
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