News

-- Excerpt :  

The new ALCOA WORLD HEADQUARTERS Building, Pittsburgh

The construction of the new ALCOA Headquarters building has now been completed. This new generation of corporate office supersedes Harrison Abramovitz's 1953 Alcoa Building as the new world headquarters for the Aluminum Company of America (ALCOA).

The building was designed to be flexible and "interdisciplinary"; an open office and "smart" workspace, to embody the new corporate thinking of the company.

The new building is located on a waterfront site across the river from downtown Pittsburgh. It is a six-story office building (236,200 sq.ft./ 21,300 m2 plus underground garage) to house the company's corporate-core.

Office floor plates are large (29,000 sq.ft./ 2,600 m2 net usable), contiguous, and uninterrupted (all service cores stand outside the office floors). These long-span, unencumbered loft spaces are serviced from the perimeter cores through raised floors, to be used primarily as flexible open offices.

Views and natural daylight penetration to the workspace are optimized by exceptionally tall floors (ceiling height of 11 ft. 6 in./ 3.5 m.; floor-to-floor height of 15 ft. 10 in./ 4.8 m.); and by the total transparency of the non-reflective -- "colorless" -- ultra-clear glass, shaded by aluminum external sunscreen ...

The organization of the building is straightforward, utilitarian, and clearly expressed: a parallel alignment of "three buildings" within the parallel alignments of the river-edge ... ...
Unmediated juxtaposition of these distinct -- elemental -- linear volumes (the serpentine block, the thin vertical-slab, the skyline-silhouette ) ... ...

+   (continued in full ... ... see building description in the next page)

© 1996, 1997 Agus Rusli

Rusli Associates, Architectural Design Consultant / Design Principal
The Design Alliance Pittsburgh, Prime Contract / Architect of Record

	. . . ALCOA contents -- or go to view of building

JAF Aviation Facility, Cambria County Airport, Johnstown USA 1992 - 1997

	. . . a/m hangar -- JAF contents-page

Construction - commenced 1995 - completed 1997

A master plan and buildings for specialty uses - an airport annex at Cambria County Airport, Johnstown PA. Included in the master plan are: a parking apron for twenty aircrafts (helicopters and airplanes); a helicopter maintenance hangar for seven helicopters (38,000 sq.ft./3500 sq.m.); an aviation training center (20,000 sq.ft./1,900 sq.m.); dormitories/living quarters and dining facility (46,000 sq.ft./4,300 sq.m.); a van pad and other storages; future expansion of parking apron for additional aircrafts and an additional maintenance hangar.

Rusli Associates, Architectural Design Consultant
DRS/Hundley Kling Gmitter Pittsburgh, Prime Contract/ Architects of Record -- (Phil Hundley)