Judges for the Associated Builders and Contractors of Georgia Inc. (ABC) may have had their hands full shuffling through piles of this year's Excellence in Construction award entries in the Mega -- Over $100 million category. Even so, they said there was no overlooking Beers Construction Co.'s one-of-a-kind regional Federal Reserve Bank at 10th and Peachtree streets. It had to win.
"The judging was pretty intense and we looked at a lot of properties," said Childress Klein Properties Inc.'s Pat Freeman. "But this was a one-of-a-kind development with a lot of issues you'd never find with any other building. They had specific needs with how the vaults functioned and money was tracked, so that made it a very sophisticated project.
"But Beers did a super job with it. It's monumental in scope, a major feat of engineering and sets a new standard for how future regional Federal Reserve Banks are built," Freeman added.
In January 1997, the bank selected Beers Construction in association with C.D. Moody Construction Co., The Integral Group LLC and Torcon Inc. to build the headquarters on an 11-acre site in Midtown, said Fed spokesperson Bobbie McCrackin. McCrackin said the Fed chose Beers for its technical expertise and breadth of market experience.
A natural choice
Beers was founded in Atlanta in 1905 and has 3,300 employees at 13 offices throughout the southern United States and Puerto Rico. The company is known for many of the buildings that define Atlanta's skyline, among them 191 Peachtree, Bank of America Plaza, the Four Seasons, the headquarters building for Coca-Cola, the High Museum of Art, the Carter Library, the Georgia Dome and Philips Arena.
Because of that, it was a natural pick to do the Federal Reserve building, said Bill Anderson, ABC's executive director, because it was meant to be a new city monument.
Willie Russell Jr., vice president of Beers' corporate commercial group, said this was the third district Federal Reserve Bank he had built but that it would be the standard by which all future district banks are measured. The project cost more than $150 million, Russell said, and involved 42,000 pieces of Georgia marble.
"We chose marble for its durability and for the way it can turn a regular office building into a monument," Russell said. "We wanted to make a statement in Midtown and we were able to get the marble for a reasonable price. In the end, the building combines a new high level of quality with practicality and security.
"A lot of time these banks look very cold and institutional, but this one is not like that. ... The courtyards and landscaping make this a very inviting place, and prove that it's not just here for banking, but here for the people of Midtown," Russell continued.
"We went through a great effort to build a money museum too, so that it would also be inviting to bring people in and let them spend time on tours about the banking system. Other Federal Reserves don't have that."
Special requirements
What impresses people most about the building is its sheer size, Russell said. The 10-story, 957,000-square-foot compound is essentially "a building within a building," Russell said, because of the 65-foot-high, high-security cash processing facility and vault that's within the building as a separate structure with its own HVAC and security system. The cash processing facility has automatic guided vehicles that handle the cash and an automated storage and retrieval system, he said. Bullet-resistant construction and surveillance systems were also used, he said.
"This project wasn't normal and it had very tough technical requirements to meet because of the unique nature of the services the bank provides," Anderson said. "It needed zero fault tolerance to failures in mechanical, electrical and security systems and it wanted to use materials from the older bank so that it could incorporate a sense of history. So they used the previous bank's boardroom. Beers met a demanding schedule for construction. They had critical dates that had to be met so the bank could vacate people from three different locations to move into the new headquarters. If these dates had not been met, the bank would have encountered financial repercussions with leases, vendors and customers."