Nissan North America Inc. Gears Up for Move to New Headquarters
Published May 23, 2008
Nissan’s new S-shaped headquarters in Cool Springs will open in July 2008.
When Nissan North American Inc.’s new headquarters opens in July 2008, it will be a state-of the-art structure. Computerized windows will let in ideal lighting, and a four-story parking garage will not be visible in a few years because hundreds of trees have been planted around it.
So continues the interesting story about the construction of the Nissan Americas headquarters building, a $100 million structure in the Corporate Centre of Cool Springs office complex. The 10-story headquarters is being built east of Interstate 65 on Carothers Parkway, between McEwen Drive and Cool Springs Boulevard.
Nissan officials announced in late 2005 that the automotive giant was moving its North American headquarters from Southern California to the Nashville area. Its new 460,000-square-foot office building has been designed for more than 1,500 employees and is scheduled to open in July 2008.
“We literally designed the building from the inside out to take into consideration how to maximize the productivity and comfort of our employees, and the overall ease of doing business,” says Rob Traynham, Nissan North America Inc.’s director of nonmanufacturing facilities. “For example, each of the nine main floors has a central, town meeting-type area where people can grab a cup of coffee or water, and discuss business for a couple of minutes. A lot of productive business can be accomplished face to face during a few minutes in a relaxing setting.”
The building will house various Nissan departments such as sales and marketing, legal, administration and finance, human resources, product planning, communications, corporate planning and information systems. Traynham says Nissan studied the relationships between the departments to determine where best to locate everyone in the building.
“We divided everything into three categories – strong, moderate or never interacting,” he says. “Departments that deal with each other often – or strong interacting – are located near each other or at least on the same floor. Those with moderate dealings are a floor above or a floor below each other, with open stairway areas between floors so that people from those departments can meet each other halfway to discuss business. There are also alternating atriums on each of the nine main floors to make things especially comfortable for those in-person discussions.”
Traynham says Nissan is being as environmentally sensitive as it can be with its new building. That includes installing a computer system in all windows to provide ideal lighting.
“Not only do the windows let in the ideal amount of light lumens, but they also control glare and heat,” he says. “For instance, one side of the building might be in the shade at a certain time of day, while another side could be in bright sunlight. The computerized windows will control both lighting-and-heat situations.”
The automotive company has also restored 2.5 acres of wetlands on the southwest corner of its 50-acre campus, planting more than 50,000 native Middle Tennessee flowers, bushes and trees.
“We also decided that instead of paving a significant amount of land with asphalt for parking spots, we built a less invasive, four-story garage instead,” Traynham says. “And with the hundreds of trees that were planted around it, the garage won’t be noticeable in a few years. We are here in Cool Springs to do business, but we also want to be a good neighbor to Cool Springs and the land around us.”
Story by Kevin Litwin
Photo by Brian McCord
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