DynaEnergetics Corporate Headquarters

Subsequent to master planning the corporate campus for Dyna Manufacturing south of Fort Worth, Texas, Arch11 designed the site’s modern corporate headquarters building.

The program includes a large manufacturing floor, executive team offices, conference and collaborative spaces, training rooms, locker rooms, and a large shared two-story community space hosting the entry, a commissary kitchen and opening to an outdoor courtyard. The community space serves as dining room, living room, art gallery and a meeting room for company-wide functions. The courtyard provides shade from the Texas heat while a modern compluvium directs stormwater into the landscape.

The building is designed to dissolve barriers between executive and manufacturing functions—lending an equalitarian atmosphere to the work life. Executive and manufacturing team spaces are visually open to one another—which required some building code hurdles. Each space of the corporate headquarters is extensively daylit and every one of the site’s 180 employees has a view out to the landscape.

The building skin, a high-performance sandwich of zinc, polished stainless steel and insulative foam attaches to the exterior of the standard steel skeleton functioning as a continuous building wrapper eliminating any thermal bridging. The curtain wall by Arcadia Glass Systems enlists an integrated sun shade and high-performance glazing to further reduce the building’s cooling and heating costs while optimizing year-round daylight and thermal comfort. Daylighting, LED lighting and lighting control systems further reduce the building’s electrical load.

The dynamic patterning of the building skin animates the transition between the solidity of the manufacturing block to the transparency of the office/public gathering block. Inspired by the hyperrealist work of painter Richard Estes, strategically located polished stainless panels and reflective glass lends the illusion of the building’s solidity “eroding” and giving more presence to the sky, site and landscape in the reflection.

Arch11 is currently completing design of phase two of the campus providing robotic manufacturing space, auditorium and additional offices along with photo-voltaic canopies for car charging.