Bayer Corporation´s Pharmaceutical Division is located on 40 acres in West Haven, Connecticut. The ten building, 1.4 million sq. ft. campus is growing rapidly, with plans for a new administration building and new research laboratories both currently underway. The existing central utility plant will be incapable of supplying the services anticipated by the expanded facilities. Through a master planning exercise, Bayer determined that they can provide the necessary services more efficiently by replacing some of their existing chillers. These upgrades will require minor architectural modifications to the existing plant. Bayer´s existing electrical substation, however, is insufficient in both space and services provided. Bay State Design, Inc. was selected to design an Electrical Substation Addition to Bayer´s central utility plant.

This physically small project posed challenges often not encountered in industrial facilities. The central utility plant is a highly visible structure, located on the main road running through the campus. Because of this, Bay State Design took special care to design an addition that will be sensitive to and on a par with the rest of the campus. A preformed horizontal metal panel system, more often found in office building construction, was selected as the cladding material. Even the colors are meant to harmonize with the precast concrete panel and brick facades of the surrounding buildings. The beige panels will be accented with a rust colored band at the top that will align with the accent band on the existing plant.

Bay State Design had the pleasure of designing two central utility plant additions for Bayer. The original scope of the project included a 12,000 sq. ft. addition to house two new absorption chillers and a locker room, as well as the electrical substation expansion. Because Bayer was completing their master plan concurrent to our design schedule, they did not have an accurate definition of their current and projected needs included in our scope. The original design was abandoned 90% of the way through design and a new scope was developed which became the current project described above. A requirement of the electrical substation addition design was that it be able to work with the original absorption chiller plant design, should it ever be required in the future.