Building-Ina-Box

What do you do if you’re in the middle of a build-out of your corporate campus, and a major recession hits? Obviously, you stop construction. What do you do if you’ve already paid for a building’s elements (foundation, structural steel, cladding, etc.)? Well, if you’re Network Appliances, you store the disassembled building. Kinda cool pictures follow.

Foundation and Skeleton

NetApp completed the earthworks and foundation for their building before pulling the plug on construction, so the slab is ready to go. If you carefully study the second of the two pictures below, you can see plywood covers placed over the mounting holes in the slab, as well as a fairly robust little roof placed over (what I presume to be) the bottom of an elevator shaft.

More impressive, of course, is the bundled structural steel piled up on the slab. If you ever wondered what a building’s skeleton would look like in kit form, here you go. I think it’s interesting that the steel is grouped into sets of elements, which are cabled together.

Interior Elements

Here we see the building’s floors, stacked neatly. (These thin corrugated steel sheets would be laid over the skeletal floors, and then covered with concrete for stability and strength.) To their right, you can see some of the building’s staircases piled up.

Because the floors are thin, and nest tightly, they take up almost no space at all. They probably store better than any other part of the building.

Cladding

In the background of the previous shot, you can just make out rows of posts sunk into the parking lot, with something or other tied to them. This is how NetApp is storing the exterior cladding of the building.

This detail shot shows the glorified twist-ties holding the cladding to the fence posts. It also shows the interesting structure of the cladding; note the steel frame supporting the cast skin. Also, note the markings, which are presumably part numbers/assembly instructions.

The cladding covers 2 parking lots; you can see one of them in the background of this shot. (The large mass in the foreground is a giant pile of dirt. I’m not quite sure what’s going on there. I believe it’s sitting on top of a parking lot, so it’s not a permanent earthwork; possibly it’s intended to fill up a lot during a later phase of construction. Alternatively, perhaps it’s debris that NetApp has opted not to pay to have removed at this time.)