THE STARR ELECTRIC PROJECT SPOTLIGHT: TIAA-CREF Southern Service Center

Location: Charlotte, NC
Project Manager: Clio Rowell
General Contractor: FN Thompson

TIAA-CREF is the world’s largest private pension system, managing more than 300 Billion in assets. Their new Charlotte facility consists of a 138-acre campus with three office buildings containing in excess of 1,000,000 sq ft of finished space. One of the buildings consists of two 300,000 sq ft, five level offices flanking a cavernous five level circular atrium. The other building is 250,000 sq ft of office on five levels. There are three six level parking decks each with 50,000 sq ft of office building fronting their parking structure. All of the office buildings have raised flooring to conceal the power and data wiring and 80% of the partitions are demountable making for rapid reconfiguration of the departmental spaces. The office buildings are all connected together by a subterranean tunnel system. The campus also contains a 75,000 sq ft Data Center with two 2-Megawatt generators and four 500 kva UPS systems for redundant power. The centerpiece of the campus is a crescent shaped garden facility that replicates the topography of North Carolina. The gardens are divided into a Coastal, Piedmont and Mountain section each with plants and structures suggesting those areas of the state, including a waterfall in the Mountain area.