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Continuing
Education
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Use
the following learning objectives to focus your study while reading
this month’s ARCHITECTURAL RECORD / AIA Continuing Education article.
Learning
Objective:
After
reading this article, you will be able to:
1.
Describe how marketing and communications functions can work in
the same structure.
2.
Describe the futuristic technology
used in the marketing center.
3.
Explain the special requirements
for the design of this facility.
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No
one would suspect that AT&T’s nerve center is the quietly
elegant building gently burrowed into the hillside of the telecommunications
giant’s sprawling 200-acre campus in Bedminster, N.J., an
hour from New York City. The state-of-the-art facility designed
by the New York office of Hellmuth, Obata + Kassabaum (HOK) is
the largest and most sophisticated command-and-control center
in the world, according to AT&T.
HOK designed
the consoles to function like automobiles. Each has its own
HVAC system and audio system. The work-surface height is adjustable. |
The facility,
which opened for business last December, 21 months after construction
began, has two independent but intricately related functions.
It serves as a marketing center where potential business and government
clients are introduced to the company’s vast telecommunications
capabilities in a high-tech visitors’ center. Tertiary spaces
contain a briefing center and corporate offices, but the primary
focal point is the Global Network Operations Center (GNOC). Operating
24 hours a day, every day, network managers direct all the traffic
over AT&T’s global network from this 70,000-square-foot
command-and-control center, carved out in the core of the 200,000-square-foot
facility.
The challenge
for HOK was daunting because this emerging building type has few,
if any, precedents. Besides designing for complex relationships
among the specialized internal spaces and providing accessible
storage for miles of fiber-optic and coaxial cable within several
switching stations, audiovisual equipment, and workstations, HOK
was responsible for making the facility “future-proof.”
Before completion, AT&T began offering ultra-high-speed bandwidth
OC-192 services and has to be ready to offer OC-768 when it becomes
available.
Rick Focke,
HOK’s lead designer on the project, acknowledges that “the
technology drove the project.” Because so much of the building
is underground, this was largely an interiors project. HOK’s
interior group first established a footprint and then began to
develop a hierarchy of spaces, based on the functional requirements.
Under the
direction of principal J. Steven Emspak, Shen Milsom & Wilke
(SM&W) in New York provided the audiovisual, multimedia, acoustics,
and telecommunications infrastructure for the building, which
translates all the data to the GNOC’s 42-foot-high panoramic
wall of 180 projection screens. On peak days, the network handles
more than 300 million voice calls and approximately 675 terabytes
(“tera” equals trillion) of data for AT&T’s
80 million customers. Real-time graphics, charts, and maps show
spikes and dips in global network traffic. Some screens show the
latest news and weather reports, because natural disasters and
military conflicts influence network traffic. While computers
handle the routing and rerouting during most of these fluctuations,
it is up to the ever-present network managers to oversee and control
network incidents.
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| The
new AT&T GNOC (above) is nestled quietly into a
hillside on its 200-acre campus. |
 Rear
screen projectors feed real-time graphics and data onto
a panorama of screens monitored by network managers. |
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Behind the
high-tech glitz, computer rooms receive data via fiber-optic cables.
“There are many computer platforms that we collect data from.
Each of these must be interpreted by a computer with special software
applications,” explains Brian Boutilier, aia, program manager
for the facility. The data is sent from these computers to the
matrix switch, which distributes video information to the screens
on the GNOC floor and to other parts of the building. “The
matrix switch, in essence, tells the video traffic where to be
displayed,” Boutilier adds.
Photo:
Stan Ries |
Following
the curve of the screen, 141 continuously running rear projectors
sit on steel and plywood racks. “It’s asking a lot of
any type of audiovisual equipment to run 24 hours a day,”
says SM&W’s senior associate Jon Burris. “The heat
buildup is incredible, and lamp life is shortened.” HOK designed
easy access to the projectors, which require relamping two or
three times a year.
With
so much electronic equipment running at full capacity in one space,
heating loads are tremendous.
Throughout
the building, the power supply is primarily run beneath a typical
steel raised floor. Cables pass through roomy ceiling trays, which
allow for future expansion. With so much electronic equipment
running at full capacity in one space, heating loads are tremendous.
Having the GNOC underground mitigates some of the demand, but
cooling still requires two 375-ton chillers. A third was installed
for future use. Backup generators ensure a redundant fail-safe
operation.
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New
Millennium Mission Control Centers
Anyone
who has ever followed a space flight knows that the Mission
Control Center in Houston is the nucleus of the National
Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Built in 1963
and located in Building 30 at the Johnson Space Center,
Mission Control was technologically sophisticated in its
day. (A new Mission Control was built in 1996.) It would
pale, however, next to the slick spaces that are today’s
mission controls, now known as network operations centers
(NOCs). These are used to monitor much more than orbiting
astronauts. And, thanks to the Internet and other technological
advances, there are more of them than one would imagine.
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Craig
Park, a vice president with San Francisco–based Intellisys
Group, a design/build firm that specializes in audio-visual,
multimedia, and infra- structure systems, says he’s
seeing “a rapid rise in the Network Operations Centers
(NOC) business.” He estimates the number of of NOCs
is growing by 100 percent per year and will continue for
the next two or three years. Most of these are for Internet
hosting and co-location facilities, such as Intel and Exodus.
But
many companies that use NOCs are not so technology driven.
This is not to say that the NOCs themselves are less complex.
Intellisys, with Gideon Toal Architects of Fort Worth, Tex.,
created a NOC for Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad.
The 20,000-square-foot facility has 75 consoles and includes
a nine-screen NOC wall. There are six briefing rooms as
well. All this is devoted to rail traffic; the screens display
weather reports, train lineups, crew status, locomotive
status, and shipping information.
Intellisys
also designed and built the Boeing Rocketdyne NOC (shown
here), also known as the Operations Support Center, in Canoga
Park, Calif. The center is designed to monitor those space-shuttle
and satellite launches that use the company’s rocket
engines. The facility includes six screens and four monitors
that display real-time data and video images from launch
locations. There are eight full-time operators on the floor.
W.T.
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The Interactive
Gallery chronicles the history of networking, specifically
the AT&T story. |
Ergonomic
excellence
HOK designers worked closely with the AT&T engineers and managers
to integrate the complex technology with the architecture and
to identify crucial spatial adjacencies. Still, technology seemed
to advance faster than the design and construction processes,
and the architect had to be prepared for unexpected contingencies
in this building type more than in most others.
With assistance
from SM&W, Focke designed the managers’ consoles, which
spread across the floor of the GNOC. Originally, he designed them
as conventional cabinets to house three large CRT (cathode-ray
tube) monitors. However, state-of-the-art businesses such as AT&T
are moving from these bulky CRT monitors to solid-state components
made of chips and transistors. Solid-state devices function exclusively
with internal electromagnetic signals, requiring no mechanical
action. This advancement has allowed the development of flat-screen
monitors, which take up considerably less space. Focke redesigned
the consoles so that the monitors are freestanding on the horizontal
surface of the console. Task lighting is contained in a self-supporting,
extruded aluminum wing that spans 13 feet across the monitors.
“Every
console functions like an automobile,” explains Focke. “Each
has its own HVAC unit, which is controlled by the individual network
manager. Each has its own radio and speakers with local volume
control.” When a manager approaches a station, sensors pick
up the presence and automatically turn on the computers.
State
of-the-art businesses are moving from bulky CRT monitors to solid-state
components.
Every effort
was made to create an ergonomic work environment. The height of
each console can be raised and lowered by an electric motor so
that managers can stand to work if they want. The sum of these
individual details achieves a surprisingly intimate work environment
in an otherwise cavernous arena.
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| There
are seven interactive displays in the gallery, as well
as art-and-artifact islands illustrating the history
of networking with vacuum tubes (above, foreground).
Equipment displays are from various time periods, such
as one from the 1950s, and a large-scale sculpture made
of submersible cable from 1915. |
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The narrative
There is an atypical architectural relationship
between the sales-oriented narrative of the facility and the internal
operations of the company. Visitors enter the building’s
reception area on grade, unaware that they are entering the building
on the third floor. From there, they are led into a rotunda with
a mosaic tile floor depicting the rivers of the world. Facts about
AT&T line the walls in five languages, reinforcing the corporation’s
evolution from a telephone company to a global telecommunications
networking giant. A high-tech gallery is the next stop. Here,
visitors witness the history of telecommunications in interactive
exhibits and “art-and-artifact islands” that include
the phones used for the first transcontinental call and the first
phone book.
A 30-seat
theater with a panoramic screen, 30 feet long and 8 feet tall
is the next destination. The purpose of this space is to impress
potential clients with a multimedia presentation of the highest
production values available. Here, HOK and SM&W pushed audiovisual
technology past its existing limits. The long panoramic screen
required three solid-state projectors, each streaming high-resolution
digital images simultaneously. In order to achieve synchronization
or what Emspak calls “edge-blend,” SM&W turned to
Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI), developer of desktop workstations,
servers, and supercomputers, whose Onyx2 machines incorporate
supercomputing and visualization technologies to process 3-D graphics,
imaging, and video data simultaneously in real time. With SGI’s
custom software, Caribiner, a Mexico-based multimedia- services
provider created a seven-minute, totally synthetic presentation
designed to excite the audience and build to an operatic finale,
aided by a Dolby Digital Surround Sound system with 15 speaker
cabinets and in-floor speakers, all of which is controlled by
a custom-design graphical user interface (GUI) on a 20-inch touch
panel.
New
technology-infused facilities need carefully planned expandable
infrastructures.
Using theatrical
rigging, HOK designed the panoramic screen to lift quickly and
silently into the wall above as soon as the presentation ends,
revealing, for the first time, the bustling GNOC three levels
below. Meanwhile, the multimedia presentation continues on 39
rear-projection screens located above the GNOC’s own 80-foot
panoramic presentation of real-life operations. With this dramatic
interface, HOK closed the gap between internal operations and
external marketing strategies.
Client, architect,
and consultants agree that the project is successful because the
systems, content, and physical space were developed as a single
vision and realized as one unit. Unlike building types of the
past, new technology-infused facilities require carefully planned,
expandable infrastructures. It’s no longer enough to pack
the shell and be done. Architects now design for change, because
nothing can impede the migration of technology.
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Continuing Education