Office Buildings

With days to go before the new tenants were scheduled to move in to their freshly renovated office building in downtown Berkeley, California, engineers learned that none of the newly installed ductwork came even close to passing the state’s tighter requirements for duct leakage. All of the ducts in the first of the two - phase project had been manually sealed with mastic before being mounted into place.

The Florida State capitol building is the centerpiece of downtown Tallahassee. The 22-story structure towers over the entire city as it serves as Florida’s home to its executive and legislative branches of state government. During a building retrofit project involving several of the building’s bathrooms, engineers noted that much of the existing exhaust ductwork had never been sealed. Aside from building code regulations that require sealed ductwork, the contractors knew that sealed ducts are paramount to maintaining and ensuring proper exhaust.

Hyundai’s new U.S. corporate headquarters was scheduled to open for business in just a few weeks. Furniture was arriving and the finishing touches were being made to the interior of the 6 - story 500,000 sq. ft. building in Fountain Valley, California. So no one was happy to learn that building engineers could not get official sign off for the project because of excessive leaks in the structure’s four smoke evacuation shafts and the outside air shaft.