Jim Moravec

"Normally a plant like this would be built out on a site away from a town or city and have no enclosure around it," said Jim Moravec of Potter Lawson Inc. of Madison, the plant's design consultant.He said that the units are normally intended to be freestanding, but the Madison enclosure was needed to allay concerns about noise from the plant disrupting the neighborhood as well as aesthetic concerns about the plant's visual impact.
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"We worked with the engineers to create a palate of materials to break down the mass of the building and create a more friendly scale," Moravec said."We had little flexibility in the size of the components of the facility, which were set by engineering constraints."

He said placement of the components on the site was determined by the shadows the components would cast.

"We did extensive, three-dimensional shadow studies for different times of the day and times of the year to determine the impact on the greenhouses across the street," he said.In the end, the shadow studies may have been unnecessary because the university has decided to build new greenhouses outside the shadow-impacted areas.

Moravec added that in addition to working with the project engineers, his firm worked with the university's architects and landscape groups to create a workable structure.

"The outside of the building is all precast ribbed panels or thin-set brick set into precast," Moravec said.The choice of thin-set brick was dictated by a combination of economics, no laydown space and the difficulty of erecting scaffolding on the site for traditional brickwork.