Faster Times

Design Firms are Busier and Under More Pressure

Even as a variety of new projects keeps design consultants busy throughout the New York metropolitan area, they face challenges to attract new staff, meet tougher client demands, and apply the latest technologies.

by Debra Wood

Design firms are facing increasing pressures in the New York region, though much of the added strain is the result of flush times for the real estate development industry.

Firms in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut are far busier now than in recent years, with many finding ample work in the hot New York City marketplace but also in less traditional locales for new development across the three states.

The strong business for engineers and architects has upped the ante for some firms by increasing the competition to find new professional staff. The firms also face demands from owners to design more quickly in order to meet tighter schedules and to incorporate sophisticated design features and green technologies.

The spread of business to new markets is evident to firms that were accustomed to focusing on New York City, said Mark Strauss, president of the New York City chapter of the American Institute of Architects and a principal with FXFowle Architects of New York. He said he has noted a shift in development from Manhattan to the outer boroughs and beyond.

"In the past, whenever there have been building booms, it has been Manhattan-centric," Strauss said. "New York is rediscovering its boroughs."

Strauss credits government initiatives for spurring some of the private investment. For instance, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey provided $85 million to convert a 71-acre waterfront tract in Brooklyn into Brooklyn Bridge Park, where a mixed-use development with more than 2 million sq. ft. of construction is slated to begin next year.

New Jersey is also bustling with mixed-use development at a level not seen for many years in places such as Asbury Park, Long Branch, and Tom's River, said Stephen Carlidge, president of the state's AIA chapter in Trenton and president of Shore Point Architecture of Ocean Grove. Typically, the projects have first-floor retail topped by residential or office space.

"Very gradually, urban centers that have floundered for so long are buying into how density is a good thing," Carlidge said.

Development in New Jersey's Hudson River communities facing Manhattan also remains strong. One of the latest projects is Metropolis Towers, which DMR Architects of Hasbrouck Heights, N.J., is designing in Jersey City for Queens-based Metrovest Equities. The pair of 25-story residential towers, set to break ground this year, will total 575,000 sq. ft.

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"This year we've had the best bookings year any of us can remember, and our challenge is getting qualified people on staff," he added. "That's limiting our growth to a certain degree."

Paul Brady, executive director of the Connecticut chapter of the American Council of Engineering Companies in Hamden, said he has heard similar frustration from his organization's members. Brady said design firm leaders tell him that it is difficult to convince engineers from other regions to relocate to the Northeast because of its relatively high cost of living and congested commutes.

Tighter project schedules are also increasingly affecting design firms. The effect results both from owners seeking ways to bring new residential and office buildings to market more quickly - in order to reduce their financing costs - as well as the lengthening in many cases of government approval processes, which Carlidge said encourages owners who finally get approvals to make up lost time.

"The single biggest issue our profession has to deal with is the compression of time and delivery of services," he added.

Clients are generally demanding higher quality work at lower prices, which is making it more difficult for small engineering firms to compete - and sometimes forcing them to merge with larger ones, said Avanti Shroff, vice president of Edwards and Kelcey of Morristown, N.J., a civil engineering firm that has grown in the past year in part by acquiring smaller firms in Maine, Virginia, and Texas.

Demands for higher quality stem from sophisticated and knowledgeable developers that are more specific about what they want in their buildings, said David Kuckuk, senior principal with the Thomas Group, a design firm based in Ithaca, N.Y., that specializes in K-12 school construction. He said the firm has to stay abreast of the latest research on how building features affect children's ability to learn, and then has to apply those findings to the schools it designs.

"There is a tremendous increased expectation from our clients about what's been buzzed as high-performance facilities," Kuckuk said.

Among the advanced features he said schools are requesting are air handlers that limit airborne contaminants; geothermal heating and cooling systems; designs that maximize the use of natural light; and low-maintenance building materials. School districts also are demanding flexible, integrated building technology systems and security measures.

Health care institutions are also demanding more complex designs, often to replace outdated facilities. That goal drove New Jersey's Essex County to hire Cannon Design of Grand Island, N.Y., to design the new Essex County Hospital Center, a 180-bed, 151,000-sq.-ft. acute psychiatric care center in Cedar Grove, N.J. It will open later this year.

Similarly, the Dormitory Authority of the State of New York and New York State Office of Mental Health sought a modern, residential-style design for the new Rockland Children's Psychiatric Center, a 56-bed treatment facility designed by Urbahn Architects of New York. Work began on the $36 million, 104,000-sq.-ft. facility in Orangeburg in August.

Other owners are simply seeking more sophisticated and striking designs, which call for intensive architectural and engineering plans. One example in Manhattan's Chelsea district is a new $59 million, 12-story condominium building that New York-based Madison Equities is building at 447 West 18th St. on a design by Audrey Matlock of New York.

The building's blue-tinted, angled façade has an irregular, zig-zag design in front of a mix of apartment layouts, including duplex artist one-bedroom units with gallery spaces lit by skylights. The design has setbacks and other features in order to conform with zoning regulations.

The project was in the demolition phase during the summer, removing two warehouses on the site, and was slated to break ground on the foundations this fall, said Andrew Harris, who is overseeing the 47-unit development for Madison.

A Much Greener Building Market

Owners and developers in the New York region are clearly on the green bandwagon, increasingly asking their design consultants for more energy-efficient buildings, even if they do not seek the U.S. Green Building Council's Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design certification.

"Our clients see the benefit of the intent behind LEED accreditation, but they're not looking for a certificate to put on the wall," said Brian Domke, a landscape architect, associate principal, and project manager for Thomas.

A big driver in the push for sustainable design is the higher cost of energy, said Bob Hickey, chairman of van Zelm. Colleges are adding co-generation plants that produce electrical energy but also allow them to capture waste heat and use it or sell it to electrical utilities.

With the new technologies, some firms are also finding new business opportunities. While Superstructures Engineers & Architects of New York primarily handles exterior renovation work, it also is branching into niche areas such as cathodic protection, which introduces a current into concrete to forestall reinforcing steel corrosion, and nondestructive testing, which uses penetrating radar to search for steel embedded within existing structures, said Paul Millman, a founding principal of the firm.

Tougher Demands on Heavy Work

Design firms in the infrastructure sector have tremendous backlogs, said Diane Harp Jones, executive vice president of Connecticut's AIA chapter in New Haven.

"There's no slack in the system," Brady said. "A year or two ago, transportation was not strong in Connecticut, and everyone kept busy with other work. Now that work is coming down the pike."

The region is awash in plans for large projects, such as a $7.2 billion commuter rail tunnel connecting New Jersey and Manhattan under the Hudson River for New Jersey Transit. The large projects are often multiyear affairs for designers, such as a $1.2 billion water treatment plant being built in the Bronx that started last year and will open in 2011.

The work is often on the cutting edge. Engineers and contractors are collaborating more often with new software technologies for complex road designs, said Edward and Kelcey's Shroff.

Transportation agencies, increasingly concerned about limiting traffic impact, are also shifting work from traditional day shifts to off-peak times - a change that often necessitates more design innovation and traffic management strategies.

One such project is the planned $175 million widening of the Alexander Hamilton Bridge in New York, which the New York State Department of Transportation is sending out to bid in February and which Edwards and Kelcey is designing. The 43-year-old, eight-lane bridge - which carries 175,000 vehicles a day on Interstate 95 and Route 1 over the Harlem River, just east of the George Washington Bridge - would require extensive off-peak work and traffic management efforts to avoid severe bottlenecks on a critical section of the region's highway network.

The regional focus on new mass-transit projects is also spurring development and density along those lines, said FXFowle's Strauss. He cited how New Jersey Transit's Hudson-Bergen Light Rail system has spurred redevelopment in Hudson River waterfront districts.

"With energy costs and the price of gas, there is going to have to be a greater commitment to mass transportation," Strauss said. "Those communities that are well connected via mass transportation will be the communities that do the best in the future."

Additional reporting by Tom Stabile.