Highland Associates
"Mission Critical" Practice

by Marc Connor

Highland Associates is an award winning, multi-disciplined firm specializing in Architecture, Engineering and Interior Design services.  The company was founded in January 1988 by a team of architects and engineers based on the principles of design excellence and service.  Our offices are located in New York and Pennsylvania and we offer a comprehensive list of services to satisfy the most difficult projects.  Highland’s principals are working members of the firm, and are personally and actively involved in the planning, design, management and implementation activities for each project.  Built upon this nucleus, the firm has grown to include an expert staff with a wide variety of experience in many project types.   Currently the staff is nearly 180 people and provides services throughout the United States.

One specific area of expertise is the design of Mission Critical facilities.  “We’ve been working on mission critical projects for as long as we’ve been in business,” says Gil Ben-Ami, P.E. Managing Principal of Highland’s New York office. More so than any other project type, our mission critical clients expect their completed projects to operate perfectly. “The clients set the bar very high, and to make sure that they are not disappointed, each project receives a team of experts who are the most experienced in that particular project type.” The mission critical industry is relatively small and while clients typically keep their successful projects to themselves, the entire industry hears about every failure.

Having been working in this industry since our inception, the Highland Associates team is well recognized in the design of mission critical facilities. We are active participants in industry organizations such as the 7x24 Exchange, Data Center Dynamics, ASHRAE, Uptime Institute, and USGBC.  Brian Schafer, Director of Business Development at Highland has served as President of the Metro NY/NJ Chapter of the 7x24 Exchange for over six years.  As President, he is extremely knowledgeable in the industry and is a frequent speaker and presenter at mission critical industry events.

To further insure their success in this difficult market, Highland architects and engineers assigned to each project work as a team from the initial kickoff through the completion of construction and commissioning. This approach is very beneficial in that the team has ownership of the project from start to finish with no “handoff” of problems to a different group, and that the team gains valuable experience with each and every project completed—experience that can not be gained by only working on a design, or only overseeing construction or commissioning.

Highland’s long running client relationships applies to their mission critical clients as well. Working at various sites over the long term has provided our architects and engineers with a unique perspective as to how systems should be configured in order to allow them to be properly maintained and what elements of system design will allow for future expansion with minimal risk to operating systems. It is very difficult to prepare critical infrastructure designs that are able to be maintained and expanded without interruption to the operating data center unless you have experienced these maintenance and expansion activities. All of our architects and engineers that work on mission critical projects have developed this experience over the course of their tenure.

The landscape of the industry has changed over the past ten years, from the dot.com era, to the geographical diversity resulting from 9/11, to the current wave of internet service providers, collocation facilities, data center developers as well as corporate end users.  These companies are growing at a tremendous rate and are constantly looking at new sites in the Metro NY area as well as throughout the country.  Highland has been very fortunate to be busy in the market and continues to do work for such clients as Digital Realty Trust, Telx, Savvis, Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse, and Citi, as well as numerous large international financial institutions and telecommunication companies.

Highland has an outstanding relationship with one of our mission critical client for six years.  We have completed data centers for them in Piscataway, NJ, Weehawken, NJ, Somerset NJ, Chantilly, VA, and Ashburn, VA.  We are currently working on a large data center expansion project in Trumbull, CT.   To date, Highland Associates has designed in excess of 4 million square feet of Mission Critical facilities.

Services
Architecture:
•  Architectural Design
• Construction Documents
• Construction Administration
• Code Analysis
• Building Evaluations
• Preservation, Renovation, Alterations
• Energy Conservation Design
• Master Planning
• Feasibility Studies
• Building Information Modeling

Engineering:
• Structural Systems & Analysis
• Lighting & Electrical Systems
• Heating, Ventilation & Air Conditioning
• Plumbing Design
• Life Cycle Cost Benefit Analysis
• Fire Protection & Detection Systems
• Building Technology  Integration
• System Commissioning
• Systems Analysis
• Energy Services
• Building Information Modeling
• Computational Fluid Dynamics Modeling