The September issue of Wired Magazine features an article on the U.S. federal government’s Satellite Operations Facility and its designer, Thom Mayne, head of Morphosis, 2005 Laureate of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, and Bentley BIM user. The facility is home to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and part of the 3 million-square-foot Suitland Federal Center outside of Washington, D.C.
As the article, which is titled “Storm Center,” explains, the facility “appears as a slash of corrugated steel and prefabricated panels, fronted with a billboard-sized NOAA sign and topped by a half-dozen satellite dishes. Most of its 208,000 square feet are hidden beneath a grass roof that blends the building into a meadow. All that’s visible is an aircraft carrier-like superstructure that seems to show little trace of human character, as if the whole building were just a rack for the satellite dishes, lit up at night like a spaceport.”
Morphosis, a leading Santa Monica-based architectural practice, is no stranger to federal projects. The article points out that between 1999 and 2001, Morphosis was awarded three major public building commissions: the San Francisco Federal Office Building, the Wayne L. Morse U.S. Courthouse in Eugene, Ore., and the NOAA megastructure. The courthouse project won Morphosis a 2005 BE Award in the category “Building: BIM for Architecture, Public Building.” The San Francisco federal office project was featured in Bentley COO Malcolm Walter’s BE Conference 2006 keynote as an exemplary “BIM for Green Building” case study.
You can read Andrew Blum’s “Storm Center” article in the September 2006 issue of Wired Magazine or view it online at www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.09/noaa. For more on the Wayne L. Morse U.S. Courthouse project, go to www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/bemagazine/supplement05/index.php. For more on the San Francisco Federal Office Building project, go to www.nxtbook.com/fx/books/bemagazine/04awards.