What fancy high-tech firm just moved into that shimmering new green building off 290 at 43rd St.?
It’s your FBI. And hiding behind those dark shades in the new Houston Field Office:
The building includes a crisis management operations center, room for several crime and gang task forces, an arrest processing area where suspects are brought in, polygraphed, interviewed, booked and fingerprinted.
There’s a “complaint duty” office where anyone can walk in and lodge their concern with an officer on duty.
It also features a heavily equipped exercise room, a clinic headed by fulltime occupational health nurse Tisha Millard and the annual Citizens Academy led by Ronnie Cutlip, outreach coordinator.
The building includes the requisite extra-long-walkway anti-porte-cochere, specially designed to thwart vehicular attacks. But its real innovation is the external green-glass skin, hung away from the building on a lightweight metal frame, and specially formulated so the agents inside will be able to keep their cool when that Texas heat is on:
***
Heavily fritted laminated glass is attached to the lightweight frame with stainless steel clips. The almost opaque glass, which is placed away from the actual thermal wall of the building, shades the structure substantially from direct heat gain from the hot Texas sun. The space between the two skins becomes a significantly cooled microclimate reducing the load requirements for air conditioning systems. Apertures in the glass skin, sized somewhat smaller than the actual windows, are carefully placed to provide excellent day-lighting with reduced glare for interior work spaces. The concrete walls are sheathed in aluminum shingles that both reflect heat and allow the high thermal mass of the concrete to benefit the temperature stability of the structure.
- New FBI HQ provides state-of-the-art crimefighting [Memorial Examiner]
- New Houston FBI Building Dedicated [39online]
- GSA Regional Field Office [PageSoutherlandPage]
Photos of New FBI Houston Field Office, 1 Justice Park Dr.: PageSoutherlandPage
I’ve been watching this building being built for the last 3+ years. We have some FBI in our building (cybercrimes guys) that were talking about the new place. They don’t think they’ll work over there because they have to stay in nondescript buildings.
I’m trying to figure out why it took so damn long to finish. It has to be because it was built by the feds.
From 290 it looks kinda like a rectangular radar. OMG… all that green glass could be embedded with top secret technology! The glass plates are actually a giant web of listening devices!!
Don’t forget the Entrapment Division, which entices losers with money and dope and then sets them up to be busted for trying to carry out terrorist plots.
Are there going to be some baby killing FBI snipers housed in that place too? Or maybe those macho dudes who burn down churches full of women and children?
Wow, I thought it was a rendering from the first shot!
We build stupid things like this because we have no faith in our ability to produce truly beautiful buildings — so we engage in semiotic stunts instead.
America, you are blowing green smoke up your own ass!
Tragically, we’re only fooling ourselves.
Cool. It’s a lot better than the crappy courthouses that the county has built downtown.
I like it…
How does one train a baby to be a sniper? Isn’t the gun a bit heavy? Just saying…