Community Architect Baltimore: Rejuvenating an old engineering firm in a historic building

Architects and engineers typically collaborate on just about any project and the usual fault line is where architects emphasize form and creative innovation engineers emphasize function and experience. Engineering offices used to show that emphasis on taking the safe route, architects would deride them as stuffy.

But lately this has changed and traditional stalwart engineering firms have moved into the hip zone, locationally and in their interior design. Whitman Requart moved from Old Goucher to the waterfront on Caroline Street, MCCormick Taylor has a trendy office in the Bagby Building and now RK&K has moved from their old headquarter on Mosher Street near MICA into the Candler Building on Pratt Street. The interior design is anything but stuffy.

modern graphics, colors and shapes
(Photo: Philipsen)

Will design influence the company culture as well? Maybe, this is asking the question backwards since no office could look as cool as RK&K's if the partners wouldn't agree to it. As Mat Hayek who managed the construction tells it, partner Tom Mohler played a mayor role in casting the concepts that Judith James from Arris Design Studio translated into detailed designs. There are the obvious references to RK&K's work: gabions (rock cages), steel panels, rebar (steel rods used for reinforcement of concrete), core drilling samples, concrete and wood. Then there are the subtler innovations such as bringing the civil and the transportation engineers into closer contact allowing collaboration. Three separate city offices are now united under one roof and on two connected floors encompassing a total of 116,000 sf of contiguous space subdivided only by low movable partitions placed in a honeycomb web on the open floors and the perimeter glass enclosed offices for directors, principals and meetings.

"We have no cost centers", says Henry Kay, Director of Transit & Rail at RK&K, "we don't have groups competing with each other". The company has five partners who are all equals and who are all actively involved in the goings of the daily work. In spite of the companies growth, the company has branch offices in Pennsylvania, Delaware, DC, Virginia, West Virginia, North and South Carolina, Florida and Texas and employs about 450 people in its headquarters, the company has not gone on a merger or acquisition spree "in order to maintain the company culture", Kay says. The construction cost of the tenant fit out in the Candler building which was purchased in 2017 by American Real Estate partners, wasn't disclosed, but Hayek says that the design was also reviewed and influenced by the employees in focus groups. RK&K has a storied tradition in Baltimore going back to 1936 when Ed Rummel joined Sandlass Wieman Consulting Engineers firm and eventually turned it into Rummel, Klepper and Kahl.

rebar in the office reception area (Photo: Philipsen)

No longer is it a company of slide-rule wizards with pocket protectors but a company in which young professionals cherishing urbanity and hipness almost as much as employees in a start-up.

Not quite a start-up, though: The new offices don't have ping-pong tables, nobody runs a skateboard through the office and the fashionable long hightop in the kitchen sits deserted instead of being used for plan review over cappucino. Apparently considering the raw concrete columns as too un-cozy one employee wrapped the one at her cubicle with photo-realistic wallpaper depicting a roaring fireplace, a director has placed the old lawyer-style former desk of a principal in his office. The open floor is eerily quiet, not only thanks to the carpeted floor, but also because of ceiling disks which emit a barely audible swooshing voice-canceling background noise.

The offices also don't break sustainability barriers in spite of energy efficient LED lighting, Energy Star appliances and an occasional VRV heating-cooling unit, since the majority of the space depends on the building's traditional HVAC system with overhead exposed ducts, vast central

Core drill samples for the Red Line (Photo: Philipsen)

air handlers and cooling towers on the roof.

The Candler building at Pratt and Market Place has an even longer history than its most recent user and goes back to 1912. The building was not designed for or by one owner but as a speculative facility for a number of possible manufacturing tenants. Over time it housed the Coca Cola Company and from 1936 until 1960 the headquarters of the Social Security Administration, before it went to Woodlawn. The spaces which the engineering firm now leases were last occupied by BGE-Constellation-Exelon before that company moved to HarborPoint. The National Register application for the Candler building includes this information:

The building is the earliest Baltimore example of an "industrial building" which was constructed in order to offer smaller manufacturers office and work spaces for their products. One of the first tenants in the building was the Coca Cola
Company, since Mr. Asa Candler, who invented the soft drink, constructed the building. It is a twelve-story red brick building an eight-story rear portion. [..]

..a railroad siding occupies three full bays and runs from North to South the
length of the structure . The sidings, platforms, and ten fre i ght
elevators give the building outstanding conveniences as a manufacutring
site with the extensive handling of material that it
entails . Heavy concrete cloors throughout the upper floors and
a flexible floorplan add to its usefulness as a manufacturing
facility. ...In its early days of the 1920's, the loft building was part of a busy wharf area , with shipping lines across Pratt Street on Pier 4 and 5 . The large "Coca Cola sign" on the roof was a landmark for seamen up and down the East Coast. The railroad ran to the building and streetcars ran up and down Pratt and Lombard.

The history of the Candler Building

The freight elevators, the old railway bays, the ventilation cores, all of that helps to give RK&K's offices character and and a layout that no modern building can easily duplicate. Here is a dual concrete column with pieces of a broken brick veneer indicating the spot where the older 2012 building and the later addition meet. There are some original wire-glass wood windows revealing the shape of an of the old exit stairways placed along the exterior wall which allows some filtered daylight to penetrate all the way to the office.

The Candler is part of the great game of musical chairs of Baltimore office buildings in which owners and tenants move the center of activity towards the waterfront. The Candler's first major renovation occurred in the first half of the 1980's. The new owner is currently fixing up the brick and concrete facade in a $1.2 million restoration effort and plans to rip out all the relatively new marble in the lobby to return it to the industrial look. Not the one the first floor had when Coca Cola was bottled and shipped here but the one that is currently chic and on display in the engineering offices on the fifth and sixth floor.

unexpected twists and views (Photo: Philipsen)

Meanwhile MICA bought RK&K's old headquarters, the 50,000 squarefoot building on Mosher Street, where the engineers had been since 1987. Reportedly the College bought the building not for their own use but as space for incubators and start-ups expected to sprout in the college's orbit.

The Mosher Street building, located hard against the JFX, has a lot in common with the Candler: It was built in the same decade (1910), it too served an internationally known company (International Harvester) and it, too, was served by a railroad spur with a bay set aside for the train inside the building.

The Harvester building, the Coca Cola building, MICA and RK&K, Social Security and BGE mirror the story of Baltimore, a story in which the city's internationally known manufacturing companies get replaced by service companies which sometimes get absorbed by out of town conglomerations such as Exelon, or leave town for the burbs, such as Social Security.

RK&K, by contrast, remains firmly in local hands. Around half of the company's employees live in the city. Their vote for the Candler is proof that urbanity and authenticity matter to architects, engineers and investors alike; two metrics in which Baltimore has much to offer.

Klaus Philipsen, FAIA

BBJ article about RRK's digs.