Moving—At the Speed of State

The consolidation of state offices at the Taylorsville State Office Building proved challenging over the multi-phase project window, and successfully produced a renovation for an evolving public sector.

By Taylor Larsen

Years since the beginning of the Taylorsville State Office Building project in summer 2019, there is visible relief on the faces of project team members who aided in designing and building such a monumental project over its six-phase timeline.

But there is a “we-did-it” smile on their faces too, as they worked to not just renovate an existing corporate campus containing three buildings and nearly 450,000 SF. The Taylorsville State Office Building changes the way the State of Utah runs its different divisions and departments, capitalizes on its real estate portfolio, and helps each fully embrace modern office work.

Initial Scope

According to Kathy Wheadon, President of Salt Lake-based design firm CRSA, the State Legislature teamed up with the CRSA team many years ago to explore what workspace and workforce optimization might look like. Their work produced the State’s first Real Estate Utilization Study in 2019, which highlighted the inefficiencies of the older buildings organized around a 1970s-era office model. 

Over 800 employees from Capitol Hill would need to be relocated from their offices during the State’s continued roll-out of its master plan for a third facility there to house new legislative offices and museum/collection space. Some of the key building occupants from around the Salt Lake Valley would be the Department of Health and Human Services, Driver’s License Division, Division of Motor Vehicles, and the Department of Public Safety.

Consolidation was one key as the State looked to pare down functions into one multi-purpose building. This included relocating the State’s data center for the Department of Technology Service, creating modern laboratory space for the Department of Agriculture and Food, and consolidating Division of Emergency Management space, which monitors security threats, both physical and virtual. 

To meet those needs, the State ultimately decided to renovate the former AMEX Building in Taylorsville.

Pack it Up, Pack it In

For the people leaving the capitol and elsewhere, their new space needed to be modern and attractive, with the seamless integration of remote work. Wheadon said the State’s ultimate goal was optimized real estate holdings via modern, efficient workplaces that could increase employee retention and recruitment.

The design portion of the project team worked to customize the spaces to better assist each agency in their work. CRSA’s design team held leadership engagement sessions with each agency, ran workshops with over 150 state agency employees to better understand user needs, surveyed 600-plus employees to ensure all voices were heard, and finely tuned solutions based on CRSA-crafted State Space Standards and Workplace Change Playbook to give the State the ability to streamline how they allocate real estate resources and standardize the sizes of office components.

Expectations, especially so deep into the information age, required a more mobile, collaborative, and tech-dependent workforce and work environment. 

However, “while work and expectations surrounding work environments had evolved over the course of the project, state space had not,” Wheadon said.

Jeremy Bringard, Project Architect for CRSA, reiterated the challenge for state workers to consider new and different ways to work—something many employees had never done before.
To help address a range of more complex workplace needs, both social and individualized, CRSA developed a “kit of parts,” with spaces to meet, focus, and recharge.


Fast and Furious Phased Construction

Moving from design into construction meant getting that home ready for new tenants. Sequencing from the Salt Lake-based Big-D Construction team was crucial to the project’s success.

“It was like a giant game of Tetris,” said Big-D Construction Project Director Brian Murphy. Taking the shapes of the different departments in all of their different locations and then bringing them to their centralized location required significant planning and coordination.

Pressure was on the project team all the way from the opening interview to win the project in July 2019, according to Murphy. The State needed to move this portion of the State’s master plan forward and finish Phase 1 of the Taylorsville State Office Building by February 2020.

Nothing was retained from the previous AMEX building, said Senior Project Manager Matt Heslop. Renovation was more akin to demolition than remodel, giving the project team a clean canvas with which to work. “We stripped it to the core.”

Construction began in earnest to get the third floor renovated in time for move-in, with the extra challenge of renovating as AMEX employees occupied floors one, two, and four.


Their work to fully renovate this floor, they said, was a stellar benefit over constructing a new office, since occupancy would not be allowed on a similarly constructed space until full completion. A new office would have taken well over a year, with the domino effect of pushing demolition of the capitol admin buildings forward to accelerate the State’s overall building plans.

As construction finished up and the third floor teams moved in, “our next constraint was having the tenant on [the third floor,] and it was the DFCM. […] It was basically like we were working in their house,” said Heslop.

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Guinea Pigs for a New Way of Working


The design team focused on creating unique space for six agencies in the Department of Government Operations, including the Division of Facilities Construction Management, Career Service Review Office, and Division of Finance. Phase I tenants of the new space became test subjects to evaluate the new work environment. 


The design team’s effort to ensure lessons were learned, Wheadon said, meant that the process continually improved.


“We ran focus groups and surveyed colleagues working in the building to apply insights to the next design phase,” she said.


Wheadon said that the new space became the sales pitch for the incoming tenants on the remaining floors. She, Bringard, and the other designers could walk the space—one uniquely theirs—and see the quality they would be getting in their new offices.

This additionally helped State leaders embrace a changing office environment by hearing from their colleagues in the newly renovated third floor, setting future expectations from there.


Removing Walls, Creating Connections


Wheadon explained the makeup of previous spaces and how the divisions’ interaction with one another was minimal, if at all. “Unless you ran into someone on the way to the bathroom or the elevator,” she said, “you weren’t going to be running into people.”

DFCM had a goal to reduce boundaries between divisions and create a more cohesive state government. Even with security requirements that limited open floor plans for certain agencies, designers found opportunities to create gathering spaces for employees to mingle and get to know each other, despite being separated by the titles of their respective divisions.


One of the major ways design accomplished this goal was renovating the ground floor cafeteria in Phase V and creating in its stead an indoor/outdoor “Work Café.”


Bringard described the shared amenity “a destination within the building,” and not just because it provided a space for employees to mingle. He said that the variety of colors in furniture and branding, along with the variety in booth and cafeteria-style seating created an energetic space. Soft materials and customized graphics helped to make this space an integral part in many of the employees’ daily routines.


It happened at the division level as well, according to Bringard. One of the major project victories happened with Third District Juvenile Probation. While telework had made the commute less stressful, employees of that department missed the sense of community they shared in their previous office. They worked with designers to give up a third of their personal office space for more room for mentoring, collaboration, and support for the mental health of probation officers, leadership, and staff.


New Space for a New Age


Remote work is here to stay, Wheadon and Bringard said, and the purpose of the office would need to shift from just a workspace to one where employees would actively want to be. 


New spaces provide a wide range of environments to support different work patterns simultaneously. Activity-based work environments now allow colleagues with dramatically different work styles that prioritize mobility, collaboration, or privacy needs to work in the same space seamlessly.


With lounge chairs in conference rooms, sit-down workspaces, and stand-up meeting space, CRSA made sure to right-size design for each division’s work stations and environments.


Light fixtures, carpeting, wood floor finishes, and other materials combined for a major shift from the previous offices, one that replaced dusty designs with modern shine. 


The ground-floor areas and their public-facing, service-oriented nature received that same upgrade. As the project team modernized work environments they looked to increase user satisfaction by making a more personalized professional space, “a space befitting everyone,” added Bringard.


He noted how the plaza design at the front entrance of the DMV/DLD areas aimed for an “elevated sensory experience.” Atrium daylighting is a bright spot, while the biophilic nature of the surrounding plantings and carpentry provide another natural connection.


Construction Swan Song 


The project’s most complicated phase was saved for last—campus-wide electrical upgrades. It was a master-class in efficiency for the TSOB, trimming down generator needs from four to two highly efficient generators for the office’s backup systems.


To get the generators on time, Heslop said transport trucks waited outside the supplier gates on Christmas Eve to make sure the construction team could get the new generator on site in time.


Lighting and the ribbon of windows around each floor of the building balance natural and artificial light, with the latter receiving new lighting controls to go with enhanced building controls.


New and Improved


Finishing the project proved a testament to consistency and dedication over the three-plus year construction window. What stands at the end of design and construction is a highly functional office space that provides the new Taylorsville State Office Building tenants a chance to do their crucial work. The project team’s remarkable collaboration built a space befitting everyone, one where the State can recruit new people while those who already work there are saying:

“Damn, this looks nice.”


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Thoughtful consideration on Oquirrh Lake transformed the initial idea for the water feature into a community and ecological asset. The 67-acre lake weaves around the 130-acre recreation space, residential area, and wildlife habitat. (Main rendering and photo pictured courtesy LHM)