Creekside Campus: The Perot Companies’ New Headquarters in Dallas
By: BRENDAN CONNOLLY & KEN REESE
The design of the new corporate campus for the Perot Companies, which manages the prominent Texas family’s various businesses, focuses on community and collaboration at an important urban site.
Located on busy Turtle Creek Boulevard just north of downtown Dallas, the three-story Class A project is on a property that had long been eyed by developers for high-rise development. The six-acre (2.4 ha) parcel is encircled by Turtle Creek and the popular Katy Trail, a multiple-user recreation greenway that connects the Turtle Creek residential and commercial neighborhood to the larger Dallas community and downtown.
The Perot family acquired the vacant site in 2011 with a goal of bringing together the family’s business units—real estate, oil and gas, and financial investments—in the heart of Dallas. The design and development team saw early that the site offered an opportunity to create strong connections to the city and community, accentuate company collaboration, and maximize sustainable building and site performance. Ground was broken in July 2014, and occupancy is scheduled for late 2016, bringing together 250 staff from Hillwood’s offices in the Victory Park and Uptown areas near downtown Dallas and Perot Group’s suburban location in Plano.
Turtle Creek is a top-tier creekside, infill development location with a rare six acres (2.4 ha) zoned for 1.5 million square feet (139,000 sq m) of residential, hotel, or Class A office use. Its central position includes good transit options and offers employees shorter commute times than the company’s current locations.
Instead of building to the city’s 240-foot (73 m), 18-story, height limi, Perot is capitalizing on the high value of the parcel through a vision for a more collaborative workplace and a site plan that engages the community and emphasizes green space and natural habitat.
The Perot family and its Hillwood Urban real estate group hired Mithun, a Seattle and San Francisco–based deep-green integrated design firm, to design the new campus, along with Dallas-based BOKA Powell, architect of record, and Dallas- and London-based Balfour Beatty Construction.
The project consists of two three-story buildings totaling 200,000 square feet (18,600 sq m) over structured below-grade parking that can accommodate 430 cars. Rising nearly 60 feet (18 m), the concrete-frame building is organized into two 100-foot-wide (31 m) office wings, with a central connector space that affords direct access to the adjacent landscape. The structure is clad with glass and limestone, inspired by the water and exposed rock of the creek bed that runs along the site.