American Savings Bank (ASB)’s headquarters marked the first new office building in downtown Honolulu in nearly 25 years. It features a team-focused workspace design that brings together teammates from five different locations on O’ahu and serves as the home base for the bank’s 1,000 Hawaii teammates. The new campus stands 11 stories tall with over 373,000 square feet and is designed to create a culture of openness and efficiency. Workplace collaboration is at the forefront of this full-service bank branch. Developed with the bank’s teammates in mind, the campus features a wide array of amenities including a complimentary self-serve Starbucks coffee on every floor, relaxation rooms, an arcade, employee fitness center and a 10,000-square-foot outdoor lanai space.  

The building’s exterior concrete panels and View Dynamic Glass windows allow ample daylighting through the building and capitalizes on the mauka to makai (mountain side to ocean side) views. The glass automatically tints to follow the path of the sun, thus reducing heat and glare throughout the day. Connected to a central computer, the glass minimizes energy use by reducing heat loads in winter and cooling loads in summer. Independent research on the product shows that using intelligent glass can potentially save up to 43% on energy.  

Throughout the project, Nordic PCL’s team worked collaboratively and leaned heavily on Lean construction tools, such as the Last Planner® System, for communication and project control. Last Planner® is founded on the ability to potentially foresee challenges and obstacles and work to overcome them early in the process. By benchmarking lessons learned, incorporating them into the project and sharing with all involved stakeholders, the team support an environment of open and honest communication and applied the knowledge to solve specific challenges. Pull planning, a Lean construction practice, was also incorporated into the project to create a collaborative design of operations and ensure detailed schedules and tasks were clearly assigned and shared. Pull planning enabled us to add a second crane on-site to successfully lift and set the exterior concrete panels and View Dynamic Glass windows.  

The eco-friendly American Savings Bank campus comes to life through the collaborative partnership between ASB and Nordic PCL, which created a space for teammates to work more collaboratively and innovatively than ever before.