The working environment has officially changed and cubicle farms are nearing extinction. Their replacement is a sleek open bench system with a smaller footprint, denser population, and one major flaw: where will the power come from and what can be done with all those cables? This ubiquitous computing haven with portable laptops, tablets and smart phones is challenging the boundaries of a building’s existing power grid.Companies have struggled with their choice of using core drills, power poles or temporary solutions. Core drills have become a relic of an expensive and inflexible past. Power poles are a design team’s nightmare, and the temporary solution of cables, duct tape and rubber covers is an accident in waiting.
Over ten years ago Connectrac’s founder, an architect himself, patented a way to bring in power and technology without core drilling or trenching. He began with a low profile extruded aluminum wireway and then added modular power and huge data capacity. He hid it beautifully with a subtle transition that made it the first choice for open office spaces in existing buildings.
The Food Network retrofits historical office space
The Food Network’s rapid acceptance and growth was impacting their headquarters in New York City. The architects at HLW were challenged with designing new offices in an older historical building for The Food Network in NYC. Due to the age of the building and its historic value core drilling was not an option. It quickly became obvious it would be difficult to provide adequate power and telecom access to the large number of workstations.
The project manager at HLW discovered and contacted Connectrac. The need was for a multi-circuit, high capacity option for power, telecom and data for each of the 12 person workstation groups. The Connectrac design team immediately created a floor plan that worked with HLW’s furniture selection. The result was an unobtrusive, powerful and economical solution.
Rockford Business Interiors renovates a connected lounge
Rockford Business Interiors, an innovative workplace solutions provider, was renovating their own office space and showroom in Austin, Texas. They were actively promoting Steelcase’s media:scape in their lounge space, which would allow people to share and access information easily and seamlessly. But how would they get power to the collaboration area along with the cabling necessary to share their work on a wall mounted monitor?
It was a simple decision to use Connectrac. It elegantly provided power via a single duplex to their media:scape lounge while also connecting the video monitor on a nearby wall. An added benefit was the built in flexibility to quickly access the wireway should any cables or technology need to be changed in the future. It was a simple, quick and cost effective solution.
