Oklahoma based Sandridge Energy recently unveiled a more than $100 million expansion of it’s downtown headquarters – an expansion that will cover three city blocks. What’s unusual about the plan by local standards is that Sandridge is reusing existing buildings, rather than relocating to an exurban campus.
The plans include a renovated 1960s tower, a restored Braniff Building–built in 1923, and a public park recycled from a pair of windswept plazas. The plans will also incorporate features like green roofs, native plantings, and storm-water management to meet LEED standards. Sandridge, which is the youngest and smallest of the city’s gas giants, is touting the project as the largest private downtown development in its history.
“If you’re an urbanist, vacancy of any kind is super tough,” said Rob Rogers, principal, Rogers Marvel (the New York based architecture firm hired for the project). “So the decision to go downtown and be a part of the city, to redevelop and reuse, is fundamentally about reinvigorating downtown. Everybody talks about being green, but one of the greenest things you can do is simply reuse things.”
History:
Downtown Oklahoma City once boasted trolley lines, grand hotels, and stockyards. Oil was discovered directly below the city in 1928, leading to its first boom. By the 1960s, however, downtown suffered from white flight, suburban sprawl, and an elevated Interstate highway cleaving it in two. Drastic measures to fix the situation only made it worse. Then the oil glut of the 1980s devastated the city’s tax base.
Unable to attract new businesses, the city bottomed out in the early ’90s. In response, voters approved the Metropolitan Area Projects Plan (MAPS) to help finance downtown’s reconstruction. The first-of-its-kind one-cent sales tax, with a strict time limit of five years (later extended) raised $360 million in public funds, supplemented by more than a billion dollars in private money to build a minor-league ballpark, the Bricktown entertainment district, a new central library, and other improvements. A second plan, dubbed “MAPS for Kids,” paid for city schools, and the third, passed by voters in December, will underwrite the city’s “Core to Shore” plan. The centerpiece of the plan is a 70-acre Central Park, and $777 million has been earmarked for a restored trolley network, mass transit hub, new convention center, running and biking trails, and even sidewalks.
Taken from http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/greg-lindsay/aerotropolis/natural-gas-giant-goes-green-oklahoma
