Pfizer Grows Campus with New Construction

Construction is Active, Despite Poor Fundamentals in Morris County

by Jason Fargo

Pfizer Inc., a New York-based pharmaceutical company, has embarked upon a $350 million expansion and renovation of its Morris Plains, N.J., corporate campus. The effort puts one of the region's largest office construction projects in Morris County, already a hub for many corporations and business office parks.

The company broke ground last spring on the 170-acre campus straddling Route 53, with completion expected next year. The highlights of the plan are a $132 million, 490,000-sq.-ft. office building on which the company broke ground in August, and a $95 million, 244,000-sq.-ft. research laboratory on which it broke ground in June. It is also building two parking garages to accompany the buildings, one with 895 spaces and the other with 1,100 spaces.

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The construction plan takes into account that much of the project site is located on a 100-year flood plain, which proved problematic when the remnants of Hurricane Floyd came through the area in 1999, said Mark Butler, director and team leader with Pfizer Global Engineering.

T&M Associates of Middletown, N.J., conducted extensive modeling of the project site as civil engineer in the master planning and building design phases, added Gary Dahms, senior vice president and principal in charge of the firm's work on the project. The flood issue resulted in additional oversight by various agencies besides local planning authorities, such as the state's Department of Environmental Protection and a regional soil conservation district, he said.

In addition to siting the buildings to avoid flooding risk, T&M planned site improvements around Rt. 53 - a highway that splits the campus - and coordinated around Pfizer's current operations, especially for the office building, which will connect to an existing facility through a pedestrian walkway.

"This is an active, productive campus right now," Dahms said. "We had to take that into account for construction staging, deciding how to arrange parking areas, and making sure workers had access to their offices."

The project team on the research building, led by New York-based Turner Construction, is executing a basement design that aims to prevent future flooding. The building's 25-ft.-high foundation walls also serve as retaining walls, and because only part of the building sits atop the basement, construction on the rest of the project was able to advance despite the tricky foundation work.

"Because it took longer to excavate the basement and do the waterproofing in the sequence that was needed, they broke that out as a separate phase and were continuing the basement work while they were erecting the steel on the other portion of the building," Butler added.

Both buildings will have exteriors of precast concrete, metal panels, and aluminum and glass curtain wall. Both also have energy-efficient features such as glass with precise shading coefficients that optimize the amount of light that enters buildings.

"You need to have good lighting, but you also have to be concerned about glare," Butler said. "So, for this particular case, the labs were strategically located on the north wall so they don't get direct sunlight but still allow good natural light."

Pfizer also made extensive efforts to reach out to its neighbors through informational meetings outside of the local planning process, Dahms said.

"They do this on a regular basis to be a good neighbor," he added. "I've been involved with many big developments, and keeping the surrounding people informed is always a benefit."

Skanska USA Building of Parsippany, N.J., is managing construction of the larger office building, with Hillier Group of Princeton, N.J., as lead architect. Francis Cauffman Foley Hoffmann Architects of Philadelphia is lead architect for the research facility.