One of the largest buildings in RTP will come back to life as a massive office campus
This story was updated at 3:30 p.m. on March 4, 2020.
After deteriorating for years, one of the largest office and warehouse spaces in Research Triangle Park is being redeveloped entirely into office and life science space for the park’s growing workforce.
At its peak, the roughly 100-acre, 731,000-square-foot Park Point campus housed the Nortel Networks company and over 9,000 employees as the third-largest Nortel campus before the company went under.
“Really, this has been a dead asset for a decade,” said Jeff Sheehan, a partner at Trinity Capital. “Our goal is take its history and invest $130 million to really turn this into a unique and special project.”
Trinity Capital Advisors purchased the site at 4001 N.C. Highway 54 on the Durham County side of the park for $37 million last summer. It is partnering with architectural firm Gensler for the project. Construction is underway that will turn the vacant site into a 652,000-square-foot office space with restaurants and recreational amenities.
Sheehan says the developer’s challenge is to take Research Triangle Park’s traditional office park look and give it an innovative, modern twist.
“We want to hold onto that great tradition but at the same time, let’s be honest: companies, workers especially, don’t want to be in a wooded campus. Our challenge is to turn it around. Stay in touch with the history and make it valuable for the next 50 years.”
The first phase of the new Park Point campus is targeted for the first quarter of 2021, and a quick turnaround is a benefit of being able to redevelop an existing building.
Innovative design
Michael Wagner, the designer with Gensler, said the project will require “selective demolition” that will break Park Point’s one building into several buildings with different uses meant for different tenants.
“We’re taking this singular massive building and converting [it] into something that is informed by urban planning principles,” Wagner said.
The five buildings — the Edge east and Edge west, the Grid east and Grid west and the Assembly — will each have different designs and uses. The first phase of the project will complete the Grid buildings and the Assembly building.
The campus will build space with flexible uses in mind from traditional to modern co-working and creative office spaces as well as space with technology for life science tenants. Planned amenities include 30,000 square feet of indoor and outdoor gathering and “collaboration” space, along with walking trails and a fitness center.
Ceilings will be taken down to break the mass structure into parts and walls will be replaced with floor-to-ceiling glass to undo the previous campus’ traditional design with little natural light.
Park Point is down the highway from the growing The Hub at RTP, where residential and commercial towers are under construction.
“There’s a symbiotic relationship where our density will create the demand for [The Hub’s] retail and residential,” said Wagner. “At the same time, that retail and residential will create demand for our project.”
Potential additional development on available surface lot space for up to 2 million square feet is also in store for when the entire project is finished.
The project doesn’t currently have tenants and will be fully built on a speculative basis, according to Trinity Capital.
This story was originally published March 4, 2020 at 3:25 PM.
