Located just south of Des Moines’ East Village in the emerging Market Street District, the new, three-story 220 SE 6th Multi-Use Building is designed with MEP infrastructure to support a diverse range of tenant businesses - from professional offices to retail and restaurants. An attached, four-story parking ramp provides 220 spaces for tenants and patrons. Baker Group provided turn-key mechanical, electrical, plumbing, and automation systems for the project.

A Showcase of Precast Concrete
The entire 220 SE 6th Multi-Use Building is designed to showcase PDM’s precast concrete and metals capabilities. Precast exteriors and interiors display varying concrete textures in walls, structural accents, floors and ceilings.  ‘Floating’ steel stairs usher patrons vertically from one floor to the next.  Fabricated metal furniture framing is showcased in tenant spaces. 

“There is no architectural precast like this anywhere. It’s worth a trip down SE 6th Street just to see the exterior details, the window sills and the brick pattern, and to realize it’s 100-percent precast concrete,” says Brandon Hummel, Baker Group’s Project Manager for the facility.

Unobstructed Views of Precast Concrete Finishes
Except for a few ceiling clouds in open office spaces and tiled ceilings in some back of house areas, all concrete surfaces are visible. This required integrating cabling, electrical, ductwork and plumbing into the concrete shell of the building.

“Precisely how this needed to be done had to be designed and fabricated before tenant plans were even on paper,” Hummel says. “We tried to keep all major equipment in the core areas of the building as to not take away from the exposed precast tees and other architectural elements in the tenant spaces.”

Being a single-source MEP provider allowed Baker Group to efficiently coordinate all MEP trades and meet the aggressive construction schedule. Among Baker Group’s solutions:   

 All power distribution and voice/data/video cabling were laid on top of the base layer of the supportive flooring and run out to a point where it could rise vertically into a wall or floor box. Cement was then poured on top of cabling to complete the flooring.

• Heating system consisting of three high-efficiency natural gas boilers serving VAV boxes located in the core of the building.
  • The first floor, which will serve as future retail or restaurant spaces, is served by independent roof-mounted gas heating/direct-expansion air conditioning rooftop units (RTUs). Tenant units are compartmentalized to provide flexibility.
  • The second and third floors, which will be home to PDM, GPS Impact, Lessing-Flynn, and DCI/Formation Group offices are served by a dedicated variable air volume (VAV) rooftop unit.
• To accommodate future tenants, a “no-fly” space was allocated for additional grease ductwork or piping that might be needed, and a 10,000-gallon underground grease interception system was installed to handle potential restaurant waste requirements.

Baker Group’s one-stop MEP capabilities allowed PDM to have a single point-of-contact for everything that went into the building’s infrastructure – design services, preconstruction services, prefabrication, HVAC, sheet metal, plumbing, piping, electrical, NFPA 70E arc flash compliance, lighting, voice/data/video, fiber optic, building automation, security systems and fire alarms.  

Hummel adds, “We applaud the ownership group in selecting a design-build team early in the process.  This high trust environment promoted collaboration throughout the process. Ultimately it got them to market much more quickly than a traditional process would have.  We had a lot of fun along the way.”