Hill Crane Service, along with their ancillary businesses California Traffic Control and HCS Transportation, is a family-owned business that has been serving the Southern California community with crane, traffic control and heavy haul trucking services since 1947. In 2014, HCS acquired a neighboring 1.25 acre parcel which created the opportunity for a larger, safer equipment yard for their operators and employees by demolishing their existing facility and building a new 2-story, 12,750 sf headquarters office building with a separate 10,000 sf maintenance warehouse. Hill Crane Service has long operated out of a utilitarian industrial warehouse building that housed all business functions along with maintenance facilities for their equipment, but it was time to refresh their look and create a more welcoming environment for HCS.
The new headquarters office building is designed to present a more public face to the community and their clients with a 2-story, glazed volume featuring the branded environmental graphics on a suspended conference room above the lobby reception area. Featuring exposed structural steel, profiled metal panels, standing-seam metal roofing and cast-in-place concrete, the construction materials and structural engineering of the architecture is woven together to reinforce the nature of their businesses.
The first floor hosts an open atrium collaboration area, a lobby and reception space, as well as private offices, kitchen, and dispatch. On the second floor, there is a large conference room, open-office work stations, private offices, a break room and copy room, an outdoor amenity terrace, and a collaboration room overlooking the atrium.
The project is designed from the inside-out and the outside-in to create a sustainable, 21st-century work environment for the company. Oriented east-west, the building features a rooftop photovoltaic array and north-facing clerestory glazing to offset energy consumption while maximizing natural daylighting for the double-height atrium space within. Support functions such as the large open kitchen adjacent to the atrium space and 2nd floor outdoor terrace introduces welcome functional amenity spaces to the company culture.