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The Dispatch wrote
Grange Insurance plans plaza, new offices with environmental touches
Monday, February 4, 2008
BY MIKE PRAMIK
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH
Grange is about halfway through its $90 million, 240,000-square-foot addition to its Brewery District office building. The project features the 10-story building, a parking garage with more than 1,000 spaces, and a plaza that will create a landmark in the district at S. High and W. Sycamore streets.
The Grange expansion will offer plenty of environmentally friendly touches, even though the company is not seeking formal Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, or LEED, status with the U.S. Green Building Council.
In addition to spaces for Grange employees and visitors, the garage will allow public access. Some spaces are being reserved for owners of condominiums being planned for the former Salvation Army warehouse just to the north. The garage will have about 20,000 square feet of office and retail space on the first and second levels that face S. Front Street and part of Sycamore Street. A walkway spanning Sycamore Street will link the garage to the main buildings.
The new entry to the complex will be from High Street and will be across a plaza at High and Sycamore that will have a water feature of some kind.
Comments
- cheap: i highly recommend the Millersport sweet corn festival of course,the cor
- Jimmy Mak: Thanks for the write-up! Just to clarify - this is the third year we've do
- Briana Henry: Well, eventually they plan to add more bands from the region...gotta start
- bucki12: I like the business model, but the internet sales part seems like something
- racheltb: I don't see the Ohio Shrimp Fest on the list. It is truly a good time. h
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Grange Insurance plans plaza, new offices
By: Walker
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i can’t tell you how happy it makes me to hear that they are replacing the glass on the existing building. i’m sure that was cool when it was built, but it reminds me of the sick copper countertops that were in my parents house when i was growing up…70s style doesn’t work these days.
Well, you’re generous. You’re at least implying that it worked in the 70′s. :lol:
it would have been nice if they built something other than a big glass box… but i guess beggars cant be choosers.
I agree. I really like the way the addition looks, but I really feel its an architects job to integrate his work, at least in some way, into the existing fabric. These two buildings are night and day.
I don’t know though, maybe it will be better when they replace the glass.
The big glass box design is supposed to reduce the heating & cooling needed for the building
there are a nearly infinite number of ways to reduce heating\cooling without using a “big glass box” design.
yeahhhhhhhhhhh! South High St. is getting some attention!
I have my doubts that this will be a plaza worth going to. I have a feeling it will be an office park bastardization of what a plaza should be.
something like the plaza outside boston city hall? that would be fabulous.
I know nearly nothing about engineering & architectual design in relation to heating/cooling and maybe you do…
Could you maybe give some examples + relative costs to these other ways? I would guess if you saw the difference in cost/performance you would see why big Glass Box wins.
I’ll let swan follow up with his own answer, but i’m fairly certain, from my own architectural education, that big glass box = the opposite of energy efficiency.
I just tried to pull some research on the R-values of glass compared to external wall material.
Here’s a helpful link:
[url]http://www.coloradoenergy.org/procorner/stuff/r-values.htm[/url]
the problem is, i don’t know enough about what kind of glass they’re using (how many panes and how much air space in between, etc) or what a typical commercial external wall adds up to rating on the R-value scale.
You can look at it from a common sense angle though.
modernist houses in California = ton of glass
modernist houses in cold climates = not so much.
It doesn’t only depend on the R-values of the glass. It also depends on the blinds they use, when the use them, and which direction the glass faces. If you use windows/blinds smartly, they can help heat the building in the winter and deflect heat in the summer.
Windows can also offset lighting needs.
Windows can also offset lighting needs.
that’s all very true. but as you can see from the building, all sides are glass. it would be impossible to ever find any glass that could possibly have the same, or greater, R Value as a traditional wall material and insulation. (maybe if you have like 5 panes of glass sealed with argon in the dead space, and the whole assemby was like a foot thick, but I doubt it even then, and even if it is possible, it would be completely impractical).
There are certainly benefits to allowing the sun light into a space, if that’s the argument, the glass would need to be to the south of the building, with some kind of internal shade angled to block the sun in the summer, when its higher in the sky, and let the sun in in the winter, when its lower in the sky. There are also a lot of coatings that can be applied to glass to prevent unwanted heat gain.
Harvested light can also save energy by eliminating alot of the need for traditional lighting (especially in an office environment, where most people will be there during the day, when its light outside anyway). My guess would be that there isn’t any one piece of the building that makes it energy efficient, or qualifies it for LEED certification, but it probably all balances out in the end.
I’ll have to go take a look at the building when I have some time to check out the glass on north, east, and south sides of the building.
so
excellent post. pod five hit the nail on the head.
i dont have any sort of advanced knowledge on the subject (im currently studying for the LEED test) but there are more complex systems that could benefit from surrounding the building with glazing (ie. ventilation systems between layers of glazing that pull warmer air into the building in winter and blow it out in the summer), but i’m fairly certain the grange addition doesn’t utilize them… because they are so wildly expensive you wouldn’t not become leed certified if you were shelling out the millions of dollars to save on one of those systems.
but this doesn’t change the fact that the building is still a featureless glass box.
very informative answers. Thanks!
I’m not disagreeing with the featureless glass architecture, but I doubt Grange’s biggest concern is how awesome their new building will look in comparison to everyone else (is this some sort of architectual penis contest?). Afterall, they are putting some cash into the Audoban[url]http://oh.audubon.org/centers/columbus.html[/url]
haha well they do say that skyscrapers are the result of architects overcompensating for something… :wink:
by Eric on February 24, 2008
So maybe that’s a different insurance company’s catchphrase, but it fits Grange in this instance. In expanding their headquarters to add hundreds of jobs, they also found themselves needing more parking capacity. What they did next was nothing short of miraculous given the trends in Columbus over the last 50 years.
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something like the plaza outside boston city hall? that would be fabulous.
You’re kidding, right?