Physical openness is high on the wish lists of public TV stations planning new HQs. Pictured above: WHYY's two-year-old building in Philadelphia. (Photo: Burt Hill, architects.)

Staying put in a onetime bank in downtown Toledo was not an option for WGTE. It would have required complete retrofitting for electrical power and other wiring, plus replacement of the elevator that tended to break down three days a week, says President Shirley Timonere.

The trustees in Toledo decided to move when they realized they'd have to invest $2.5 million in the old place, and they still wouldn't have a building worth $2.5 million, she says. WGTE moved into its new home in May.

In Carbondale, Ill., where progress toward a new wing on WSIU's headquarters is stymied by recession, General Manager Bob Gerig can show visitors that there's no more room for cables under the floors, and can point to rooms that can't handle the heat generated by digital equipment.

More openness: The glassy lobby
of KETC, St. Louis.

A clear view of purpose

When the planners at WITF in Harrisburg boiled down their desires for their new building, they came up with three characteristics, says President Kathleen Pavelko:
visibility, accessibility and flexibility.

Their counterparts at other stations came to much the same conclusions. Nearly all of the new buildings highlight the techno glitz that their old facilities hid in the back rooms, and most are incorporating special corridors for tours to bring the public further in.

"We have turned the building inside out," says Pavelko, referring to plans for a wide glass HQ above Interstate 283. WITF's tech center will be visible through windows from the lobby. Visitors will see its radio master control room in a freestanding glass cube.

In Tampa, WUSF escaped from a basement on the University of South Florida campus and now revels in a bright, two-story atrium. Given a site straddling a major walkway on the campus master plan, the station swallowed the walkway. Students trudging to class from their dorms can cut through the building, taking a corridor lined with double-glazed windows with views of the studio and control rooms, says Bill Criswell, a partner in CBB architects, St. Petersburg.

Connecticut Public Broadcasting, which aims to move to a new site in Hartford within about two years, also wants to make its behind-the-scenes "show business" visible from the street. [Later article.] The present building is so undistinguished it could be a peanut butter factory, says the network's president, Jerry Franklin.

The most valued medium: in person

The retro-modern home of WHYY in Philadelphia, completed two years ago on the downtown site of its old building, is a model for some of the facilities now being planned.

It was built to fit WHYY's long-term business plan, says President Bill Marrazzo. It supports the image of the station as a unique, accessible but high-tech public institution, "putting the public back into WHYY," he says. "It's easy to see in and out of here. That's branding."

The plan puts glass doors on one wall of its TV studio, which can be expanded into two adjacent rooms that WHYY calls its Civic Space. Though this is an acoustic "no-no" in the view of studio engineers, it achieves the station's objective of a transparent, accessible multiuse space with room for hundreds of visitors, comments Chris Pullman, WGBH's v.p. of design, who visited a number of new facilities in preparation for planning one in Boston.

The space would make room for events that serve the station's programming and fundraising plans. Marrazzo's favorite such event didn't happen in WHYY's new space, but it could have. In the spring, when the station was airing the American Experience documentary about math genius John Nash, the Free Library of Philadelphia and WHYY collaborated on an in-person panel discussion at the library with Nash and experts on schizophrenia. The moderator and a moving force behind the event was Dan Gottlieb, a family therapist and host of WHYY-FM's Voices in the Family. Members of the library and of the station made up much of the audience, and like other human beings they give high value to in-person experiences. The connection with WHYY's business plan, Marrazzo says, is that membership renewal rates for both organizations will rise.

Three years ago, when WHYY started its Civic Space events, it touched 3,000 members, he says. Last year, it was 13,000. This year, the number passed 39,000 after nine months. Unrestricted donations rose $1 million over the previous year.

"At the heart of our strategy," Marrazzo says, "is a behavior that we commonly call collaboration—I've begun to hate that word because I've overused it." But the practice is useful, he says: "WHYY is learning to subordinate its interest to its community partners'. Both institutions are being lifted up."

And there are media products of such events as well: Digital recordings become material for radio and TV programs and WHYY's website.

"A good TV or good radio show becomes even better," Marrazzo says, "when it can move to other media, to the Web, to off-air and off-line experiences that allow members to learn from each other, not from a broadcast signal."

Planning for the unknown

There's anxiety to spare as station execs try to plan structures that will serve—or impede—their organizations for decades into the future.

"I didn't want to be cursed by people 30 years in the future for making boneheaded choices," admits one station planner.

The easier choices take care of needs that stations already have.

In New Orleans, WYES decided to keep and surround a preexisting 1960s building on the site of the planned multistation New Orleans Teleplex, says President Randy Feldman. The old building will accommodate the three-times-a-year deluge of merchandise for the auctions that WYES counts on in a city where there's less disposable income for memberships and more for auction bargains.

At other stations, planners considered the wide-screen aspect ratio that's standard in DTV and made sure their studios have wider backdrops.

Recognizing the move toward servers for video storage, planners are setting aside more space for hard discs and less for tapes on shelves (though enough for any archives that remain on tape).

Other design decisions simply leave lots of room for change and growth. KETC in St. Louis put an extra 4,000 square feet of unfinished space on its second floor for future expansion. Houston's KUHT cut back the size of its building from 100,000 to 62,000 square feet, setting aside space for future expansion, according to architect Walter Gregg of Rees Associates.

Gregg advises planners to insert "soft space" such as storage adjacent to technical rooms so that the technology can expand as needed.

Architects of the new stations are planning broad raceways for wiring in raised floors or in ceilings where technicians can easily reach them to make those inevitable changes. In Tampa, WUSF's architects left room for 50 percent more cables than the station needs now and specified 15 to 20 percent extra rack capacity for new equipment.

The architects for WHYY put wiring overhead in exposed cable trays and turned them into part of the motif by supporting the trays with tubular girders that look like part of an antenna tower.

They also specified heavier power supplies and stronger air conditioning to handle more and faster computers, says N. Scott Jones, an architect with Burt Hill Kosar Rittelman Associates. "We used to use 500 watts per rack as the cooling load," says Jones. "Now we're seeing close to 700 watts per rack."

Don Archiable, a longtime NBC facilities planner who heads media work for the big architecture firm Gensler, likes to see stations install Broadcast Service Panels (BSP) throughout a facility. The panels, with connectors for nearly every kind of camera, microphone or intercom, allow producers to hook up any piece of equipment to any other through a router.

"You can call up Camera 4 and Microphone 18 and bring them to a particular edit suite," he explains. Behind the panel are unused cables for purposes unforeseen.

The push toward cubicles

Planners are adding multipurpose space in the name of flexibility. In Albany, WMHT's architects have laid out a 16-foot-wide corridor down the center of its planned new building on a wooded site near the Hudson River. The corridor, with a view of the woods at the end and control rooms along the side, will accommodate receptions, staging areas for on-air auctions and other peaks of activity, says architect Paul Lewandowski of Einhorn Yaffee Prescott.

The desire for flexibility (and more desks per square foot) is also driving the move toward open-plan offices where most station employees will work.

"We didn't expect to be perfect in predicting our needs," said Tom Jackson, senior v.p. for planning and development at KETC in St. Louis. "It was better to design something that could be readily reconfigured."

Harrisburg's WITF, with a staff of 120 full-time and 50 part-time, will have fewer than 15 four-wall offices, Pavelko predicts. But the plan quadruples the space in conference rooms so that staffers will have places where they can close the door.

At WGBH, Pullman expects a hybrid of open and closed spaces, arranged so that natural light reaches as many workers as possible. If many are sent to cubicles, the transition may not be easy. Only 25 percent of WGBH's office space today is open plan, he says, and many employees have doors they can close. "That is the culture."

Staffers who haven't tried a cubicle don't know whether they'd like it, Pullman says. "It's an open question how little privacy is too little. It's a sensitive issue for people."

Pullman liked the open plan in WNET's new Manhattan digs, which are highly subdivided even though they cover most of two city blocks. But he found that WHYY's cubicles "gave the impression of a vast, single-height, uniformly lit insurance company."

In the maze of cubicles, "Conversations take place in a much more furtive manner," says Sue Spolan, a director for WHYY's Fresh Air. "There are very few places you can go and have complete privacy."

"A lot of ideas were going into the building and not necessarily paying attention to the people who have to work there," she says. "People adjust to it, of course."

Some managers, fans of crossplatform content, are taking the opportunity to throw their TV, radio, web and print producers together and give them a good shake.

At WITF, which publishes a regional magazine as well as running TV and radio stations, managers want to use material in all media.

When cocaine usage surfaced in a rural community, Pavelko says, WITF's magazine profiled a teenager who died of drug abuse, the FM station reported police stories and the TV station chewed over the topic on call-in programs, providing referrals to counselors when appropriate. With the new building, WITF will be able to bring in reporters for its for-profit Radio PA news network so they can share a newsroom with its own FM reporters.

In Philadelphia, WHYY deliberately put radio and TV producers together in the same office "pods" so that they could get to know each other more easily and share material from their work, says Marrazzo.

They also share studios. WHYY's Studio 2 can be either a big radio studio or smallish TV studio, as required, says Jones.

With collaborations in mind

Managers are making major facility decisions to fit their long-term hopes for collaborations with other local nonprofits.

In Detroit, WTVS is moving toward the condominium purchase of five floors in a new residential and retail development near a new partner—the planned Detroit High School for the Fine, Performing and Communications Arts, according to station President Steve Antoniotti. The site in the Woodward Avenue corridor is across the street from Orchestra Hall, home of the Detroit Symphony, which is also involved in partnerships with WTVS and the school system.

The station chose the site because of a 10-year pact with the city school system, Antoniotti says. Key provisions:

• The school system will pay WTVS to manage and staff a $40 million high-definition TV production studio, paid for by bond issue, that the city is building in the magnet high school, which will be linked to the station by fiber.
• To supplement its own studio, the station will be able to use the high school's studio for a fee, when it's not used by the school. And the school system will be able to use, for a fee, a high-definition production truck that WTVS plans to buy.
• The school system will have the right, for a fee, to schedule programming on one of WTVS's digital multicasting channels 12 hours a day, including instructional programs, sports coverage and student productions.

The deal with the school system is part of the station's broader "Share the Vision" plan that also aims to develop an arts-and-culture multicasting channel, says Dan Alpert, chief operating officer. WTVS stands to gain substantial revenues if voters in two counties approve a cultural tax added to real estate taxes, Alpert says.

Cleveland's WVIZ-WCPN combo, now known as ideastream, is also pursuing partnerships with other local institutions. President Jerry Wareham says the pubcasters have been exploring relocation options with Cleveland State University and the Playhouse Square Foundation, operator of a multistage theater complex near the university on the eastern edge of downtown. [Later article.] WVIZ merged with public radio station WCPN a year ago but the organization is still split between two locations.

Ideastream and its partners describe their hopes for their project in terms of "principles" that sound much like those of pubcasters in Philadelphia and elsewhere. They want the facility to be a warm and accessible gathering place, with high-quality services and technical connectivity and room for people to make great media content.

The area around the piano, plus the studio at left and meeting room at right make up WHYY's flexible Civic Space for events. (Photo courtesy of Burt Hill Kosar Rittelmann Associates.)

The planned teleplex in New Orleans itself will be a collaboration. Both of New Orleans' public TV stations, WYES and WLAE, as well as pubradio station WWNO, plan to move into the same new two-story structure in a 34-acre technology park at the University of New Orleans.

To operate joint production facilities for them, WYES and WLAE will form a company called New Orleans Productions, says WYES President Randall Feldman.

(The bad news about the site on Lake Pontchartrain is that a worst-case hurricane someday is likely to blow much of the huge lake's water into the teleplex and the rest of the city, according to Feldman. But it could be worse. Neighborhoods on lower land will get the worst of it, Feldman has been told, while the teleplex will be only nine feet under.)

Where the money comes from

The New Orleans Teleplex benefits from the high-tech aura of the technology park, which, the state hopes, will bring in economic activity worth $45 million a year.

Feldman says the state has committed some $10 million toward the $19 million project through the state-owned network, Louisana Public Broadcasting, which is half-owner of WLAE. A capital campaign and federal aid will cover the rest of the costs.

Other stations are counting on bond issues, capital campaigns, state legislation and good luck to pay for their new homes.

Connecticut Public Broadcasting is expecting to get $10 million of a new building's expected $13 million cost from Trinity College in Hartford. The statewide nonprofit network has operated for 40 years on two acres originally donated by the college. Now looking to expand, the college offered to cover the network's relocation costs, Franklin says. He says the network is now considering three vacant lots in the Hartford area, including two near the Bushnell Arts Center.

Like other state-owned stations, WSIU at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, is waiting longer than expected to get the go-ahead for new facilities. The annex containing its new operations center was on the state legislature's list of capital projects and might have been funded this year if the economy hadn't gone south, says Gerig. Now he hopes the money, about $3 million, will be approved next year.

Cloth coats for all

Whether the benefactor is the state legislature or major and minor donors, planners are taking care to avoid anything that looks even remotely extravagant.

That was Timonere's advice to planners in Toledo. "Basically I said we need the Republican cloth coat," she recalls, referring to the sensible garment that Pat Nixon displayed to avoid the appearance of wealth. "We have always had the philosophy that any money we had always went to the air."

Jones, who worked on NPR's new headquarters as well as WHYY's, says pubcasters examine every proposed material, wondering whether anyone will find it insufferably opulent.

"You want it to look nice and durable," says Jones. "You stay away from high-end wood paneling. You get the effect of bold statements of space and lighting."

The wrong impression, even if it's unfair, can come back and smack the pubcaster upside the head.

Two public TV stations and an FM plan to move in together at the University of New Orleans technology park. (Image courtesy of WYES.)

Serious budget shortfalls led to the purge of Georgia Public Broadcasting management in 1999 and 2000, but it didn't help that Atlanta Constitution reporters said the network's new headquarters, opened in 1997, was "grand," "posh" and "elegant." There was no dispute that it was also big—a 227,000-square-foot Midtown tower where 200 TV and radio employees work.

The network was criticized for putting granite floor in the lobby though granite would cost less than vinyl tile when maintenance costs are considered, says Ralph Blackman, a Rees Associates architect who worked on the building.

Executive Director Jim Lyle, who joined the network two years after the HQ was built, says it's not the building he would have built, but acknowledges it's a nice one, "probably ahead of its time."

One thing Lyle would change is the ratio of studio space to edit suites. With producers working increasingly in the field, the Avid suites are busy and some producers must line up to do their editing before or after office hours.

Lyle admits that the network's executive suite does indeed contain the shower that newspaper reporters apparently regarded as an extravagance.

"There is a shower," he says, putting the amenity at the greatest possible distance. "It does not have a shower curtain. To my knowledge, it never has been used."

	To Current's home page
	Earlier news: WGBH buys building and additional land two miles from present home in Boston.
	Later news: Cleveland and Connecticut stations announce building plans.

Web page posted Jan. 19, 2003
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Georgia Public Broadcasting's Atlanta headquarters, opened in 1997.