I write about the military and some of this involves military construction, or MILCON, as it is called. The military has spent billions of MILCON dollars here, particularly at Camp Lejeune and other eastern North Carolina installations on Marine Corps projects over the past five years. The Navy is building a big C-130 hangar complex in Kinston, at the Global TransPark. The Army is always building at Fort Bragg.
So I write a lot about military construction projects, when contracts are bid and awarded, when ground is broken and ribbons cut.
This is a different tale altogether, about a military construction project that is in Colorado, at the Air Force Academy, in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. It is notable for us because it has been designed by architects in Raleigh, trained at NC State. They work for Clark Nexsen, an architectural and engineering firm with roots in Virginia and nine offices and 400 employees in the Southeast. And it is also notable because the focus of the building is to train Air Force cyberwarriors and to develop new ways to wage the new kind of cyberwar.
The building is the Madera Cyber Innovation Center, a nearly 50,000-square-foot, $50 million structure.
The firm that is now Clark Nexsen was founded by architect Pendleton Clark, in Lynchburg, Virginia, after his service as a naval officer in World War I. As the firm grew and Clark took on new partners, it specialized in higher education and military buildings, two growth areas. College buildings all over Virginia were designed by the firm, beginning in the 1920s and 1930s. That higher education work is also evident throughout North Carolina, including the engineering building, Fitts-Woolard Hall, on NC State’s Centennial Campus, which opened in 2020.
Over the decades, it has designed hundreds of buildings for the military, including facilities at Fort Bragg and Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton in California, as well as hundreds of overseas installations. Since 2008, Clark Nexsen has gotten nearly $270 million in federal work as a prime contractor, mostly for the Department of Defense, according to USASpending.gov.
In May, Clark Nexsen announced it is merging with a larger Maryland firm – Johnson, Mirmiran & Thompson.
THE MADERA PROJECT
The new building, officially opened in April, is really a symbol of changes that have been happening in the military over the past decade to spur innovation. In addition to being an academic building, it is the home of AF CyberWorx. There are many similar innovation hubs around the military. That is why an outfit called NavalX has something called the Eastern North Carolina Tech Bridge next to the airport in New Bern. It was why the Defense Innovation Unit was created, and the Silicon Valley Innovation Program in the Department of Homeland Security. This goes in cycles, incidentally. After Russia launched Sputnik in 1957 the government created DARPA, which gave us the Internet.
In 2015, the concept of AF CyberWorx was presented to some senior Air Force leaders, with the idea of housing it at the academy. The Air Force Academy committed to temporary space. Congress authorized $30 million for a building in the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act, and they were in business. The project became bigger than originally scoped because it attracted private donations from academy alumni, like Paul Madera, who graduated in 1978, served as a fighter pilot, and then got a Stanford MBA and became a technology venture capitalist. He was an early investor in Facebook and Salesforce.
DINING ROOM CALLS
The project was put out for bid by Air Force CyberWorx in mid-April 2020, a month after lots of us started working from home. That is why Jennifer Heintz of Clark Nexsen was on calls about the building design at her dining room table. Heintz, a Statesville native and 1998 graduate of NC State’s College of Design, was the senior project architect on the job for Clark Nexsen, which had been hired by Bryan Construction, a Colorado contractor. This was a challenging building to design, with an exterior that was almost all glass and a multi-story spiral-ish staircase. It’s the spiral-ish part of this that makes architecture hard and interesting.
The academy’s McDermott Library has a spiral staircase, and the desire was to put one in the Madera building.
“When we got the project,” says Heintz, “it was an option to do a spiral staircase in the middle of the building. But at the time they accepted that option, we were too far down in the design, and the space allowed for it did not allow for a true spiral. So that’s when we engaged Ryan.”
Ryan Johnson is a computational designer in the Raleigh office.
“A spiral stair is a literal circle. It just wouldn’t fit in the rectangular opening,” says Johnson, a Winston-Salem native who went to App State as an undergraduate before getting his master’s in architecture at NC State. “What I’ve been calling it, it’s like a free-form spiral stair. So, if you look up it’s kind of crossing over itself. It looks like it’s crossing over itself, moving in and out. As opposed to just a pure geometric circle form.”
Another challenge was designing the glass safety rails up the staircase. “You can bend glass but if you do, there’s lots of rules around bending glass, so that you can actually bend it correctly and not have it break and explode,” says Johnson.
“We came up with an idea that we liked architecturally and visually. And that’s where the computation comes in. We basically write a script that rationalizes that geometry in a way that can be built by the glass.
“And then the script works its way back and does the rest. Validates that it works, and then we can draw the treads and risers and that ultimately works back to the structural concrete. It’s a structural concrete stair. There’s no columns bracing. It only touches the ground at the bottom and then the two landings.
Three floors plus a mezzanine.”
What has happened over the past quarter century with architecture is what has happened everywhere, with ever more powerful computers and software. Digital visualization tools like Rhino have gotten more powerful.
“We provided the actual geometry in 3D for the fabricator to make the formwork from, and then they poured all that formwork which was coordinated and designed pretty heavily by the engineers,” says Johnson.
The engineers used laser scanning to check and recheck the stairs during the phases of construction. “It required precision. More than a typical building.”
“Ryan and I, we’ve done extensive work on NC State, Duke, Chapel Hill, Wake Tech, UNC Charlotte,” says Heintz. “This was just a great opportunity for us to really elevate each other within our office, as well as give ourselves new experience. I have been at this for 26 years. I like learning new things and this building, with some of its more innovative ideas, allowed me to do things I have never done.” ■
