Dive Brief:
- DPR Construction has said goodbye to its old headquarters in Redwood City, California, and moved about 30 miles south to a new flagship campus in Santa Clara that brings its administrative, craft and fabrication teams under one roof.
- The 113,702-square-foot facility encompasses both office space and the firm’s new Prefabrication Assembly Facility, which houses self-perform teams for drywall, finish carpentry, architectural concrete, roofing and building envelopes and specialty systems.
- DPR said the space, located in the heart of Silicon Valley, creates an environment where building components can be preassembled in a controlled setting using virtual design and construction tools while improving safety, quality and productivity to reduce schedule risk and jobsite congestion.
Dive Insight:
The move and consolidation aims to break down barriers between craft and front-office workers by combining the three business parts in the same location. Within DPR’s new headquarters, 68,160 square feet is dedicated to open office space, while 45,542 square feet is slated for prefabrication. All DPR employees will have equal access to workspaces and amenities.
“I think traditionally, construction, even to this day, there's this invisible wall or firewall, and it's like you're either on the office side or you're working with your hands,” Kevin Chen, co-business leader for the Bay Area, told Construction Dive. “It just doesn't feel [as] collaborative as it can be.”
The prefabrication lab is another stepping stone for the contractor as it continues to invest in the building method. The lab is designed to ensure no weather-related disruptions to production, which the company claims will provide reliable, repeatable construction outcomes. The office location, meanwhile, seeks to provide consistent commutes for craft workers, a critical issue in the traffic-clogged Bay Area.
And it’s not DPR’s first foray into prefabrication. In 2021, the contractor broke ground on a prefabrication research facility in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina.
The company previously emphasized the importance of prefabrication on data center builds. In Texas, the company has fabricated electrical rooms, central utility plants and major mechanical and electrical piping racks to cut back on onsite construction.
Chen said that DPR had been thinking about prefabrication long before the data center boom. Using those prefabricated components helped reduce congestion in the field and led to a more predictable, higher quality product.
“We were already building data centers for many, many years,” Chen said. “But as they got larger and as they got quicker, there was no better way to service our advanced tech customers than with our prefab capabilities.”
