Albany

After three years at the Watervliet Arsenal, the high-tech construction firm M+W U.S. is moving its headquarters to the new ZEN building at SUNY Polytechnic Institute in Albany.

M+W is the latest local company to announce plans to relocate its operations to ZEN, which has become one of the most desirable pieces of real estate in the Capital Region. Tech Valley High School and CNSE CMOST, the children's museum in North Greenbush, are planning to move into ZEN this summer when construction is completed.

M+W, which built many of the buildings on the SUNY Poly campus and the GlobalFoundries computer chip factory in Saratoga County, moved its headquarters from Plano, Texas, to Watervliet in 2012.

M+W will take 30,000 square feet at ZEN but will maintain a presence at the Arsenal, where it has a training center for unionized pipe-fitter workers who install sophisticated equipment in the technology-intensive structures that the company builds.

Because the Arsenal is a U.S. Army installation, getting employees and contractors through the gate is not always fast or easy. But Ron Oakley, the CEO of M+W U.S., said that daily employee life at the Arsenal did not play a role in his decision to move the company's main offices to SUNY Poly.

The company has had a presence on the SUNY Poly campus dating back 12 years when the school was part of the University at Albany, and it maintains an office there.

"The driver was being here," Oakley said when asked the motivation for the move. "It was this place."

At 356,000 square feet, ZEN will be the largest zero-energy building in the world. The building, home to SUNY Poly's renewable energy programs, will generate more electricity than it uses and will be surrounded by a two-megawatt solar farm, one of the largest in the region.

M+W envisions that its offices on the fourth floor of ZEN will house 160 employees as well as its new solar division, Gehrlicher Solar America.

See original here:
SUNY Poly ZEN building will be home to high-tech construction firm