Utah's First Large-Scale Mass Timber Building Goes Up

Method Studio, Okland Construction and BHB Structural Engineers are collaborating on the five-story Baltic Pointe office building in Draper, Utah, that serves as a pilot project to explore the practicality of mass timber for future commercial construction throughout the Mountain West.

“Not only is mass timber conducive to Utah’s climate initiatives, it also provides for faster builds that are just as strong and safe as traditional buildings, providing one more tool to help meet the region’s growing construction needs,” says Steve Marshall, former assistant director of Wood Innovation at the U.S. Forest Service and consultant to the project’s investment partners: Utah-based start-up studio Philo Ventures and commercial real estate developer and management company Gardner. More than 1,500 mass timber projects have been constructed or are in design in the U.S., although few are in the Mountain West. Mass timber is largely prefabricated off site and pieced together like a giant puzzle, so proponents say it facilitates shorter construction times completed by a smaller labor force while also offering a greener alternative to CO2-intense steel and concrete buildings.

Henderson Cos. Opens Denver Office

Henderson Cos., the employee-owned parent company of Henderson Engineers and Henderson Building Solutions, has opened an office in Denver’s historic Ghost Building at 800 18th St. The 4,801-sq-ft space houses 15 employees and is the company’s 13th national office location. While Henderson has worked on projects in Colorado since 1993, the new office will support the firm’s focus on growth in key industries like K-12 and mission critical while also providing a physical space for local employees to collaborate in Henderson’s hybrid work environment.

104th Commerce Park First Phase Complete

Trammell Crow Co. and JV partner Clarion Partners LLC have completed construction on the first phase of development at 104th Commerce Park, a 1.17-million-sq-ft industrial park located at 104th Avenue, just east of the intersection of State Highway 85 and Interstate 76 in Commerce City, Colo.

Phase 1 includes two move-in ready industrial facilities, and the full project plan will consist of five Class A buildings situated on the 89.6-acre site, with prime interstate access, highway visibility and flexibility for industrial users expanding in the Denver metropolitan area.

Texas Instruments to Invest $11B in Utah Fabrication Plant

Texas Instruments will invest in a major expansion of its microchip manufacturing facility in Lehi, Utah.
Photo Courtesy of Texas Instruments

Dallas-based Texas Instruments Inc. announced it will invest in a major expansion of its microchip manufacturing facility in Lehi, Utah. The Utah Governor’s Office of Economic Opportunity and the Economic Development Corp. of Utah, which helped develop a package of post-performance state tax incentives of up to 30%, says TI agreed to capital expenditures of $11 billion and to creating at least 800 new, mostly high-tech jobs over the next 20 years.

Boise-based Micron Technologies originally built the Lehi semiconductor chip fabrication plant, known in the industry as a “fab,” in Lehi in the late 1990s.

Micron sold the entire facility and surrounding undeveloped property to TI in 2021 for $900 million.

Consisting of several buildings with a total of 2 million sq ft of manufacturing space, TI renovated the buildings for production of its latest generation of 300-mm semiconductor wafers that are sold to manufacturers around the world for use in automotive, industrial, communications, personal electronics and other products.

The new facility will be built next to the existing fab, and they will operate in tandem.

Gresham Smith Expands Into Denver

National architecture and engineering firm Gresham Smith has expanded its operations into Denver. Design and construction of its new 8,000-sq-ft office space is underway in the Park Central tower at 1515 Arapahoe St. The firm will initially focus on serving clients in the aviation and health care industries as well as the firm’s life and workplaces market, which focuses on mixed-use, residential and workplace environments.