Turner Wins $73M Government Contract for DC Office Building Transformation

March 4, 2010
By Barbra Murray, Contributing Editor

Courtesy Flickr Creative Commons user cytech

Thanks to allotted funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the government has maintained a steady stream of construction activity during the recession, and Turner Construction Co. is getting in on the game. The New York City-based firm recently won a $73 million contract from the General Services Administration to spearhead general contracting services for the conversion of a vacant 547,000-square-foot federal building into a premier office property.

Federal Office Building 8, which sits within Federal Center Southwest not far from the U.S. Capitol, was developed in the 1960s and utilized as a laboratory. Turner is charged with transforming the structure into a modern office facility that will adhere to the government’s new green standards. Among the building’s sustainable features will be two new atriums, glass curtain walls and projected window bays. The project is designed to qualify for LEED Gold certification.

When Turner’s work is done, Building 8 will become home to approximately 2,000 Department of Health and Human Services employees and committee staff members of the House of Representatives.

Those big government contracts will continue to flow. GSA pocketed approximately $5.5 billion from the stimulus bill for the purpose of converting federal buildings into high-performance green buildings, as well as renovating and constructing new federal facilities and land ports of entry.

“We have set interim target dates for project awards in each quarter to ensure we obligate $5 billion of the more than $5.5 billion we received in Recovery Act funds by the end of fiscal year 2010,” Robert A. Peck, commissioner of GSA’s public Buildings Service, stated before a House of Representatives committee on February 23. A total of $4.5 billion of the funds are expressly designated for property greening activities.