Newport Financial Ctr. wins intelligent building award

Real Estate Weekly, March 30, 1994

At a recent awards ceremony, Newport Financial Center located in Jersey City, N.J., received the Intelligent Buildings Institute (IBI) Award for Excellence in Development - New Construction. The Award Was presented at the FUTURE/BUILD 2002 Conference.

The Intelligent Buildings Institute, an international association whose members are drawn from 21 nations, defines an intelligent building as one which creates an environment that maximizes the efficiency of its occupants while at the same time allowing effective management of resources with minimum lifetime costs. The structure must be designed to accommodate change in a convenient, cost-effective manner.

The Newport Financial Center overlooks the Hudson River directly opposite Wall Street. "Despite the steady growth of data-intensive and telecommunications-dependent business operations in major industry sectors, most new office facilities do not meet current requirements of new technology," commented Koshi Okamoto, senior vice president, Marketing and Operations of Newport. "Our building was designed to meet today's technology pre-requisites on a framework that will grow along with future technology advances."

To create an environment that offers the highest standard of technological excellence, the Newport facility includes over 100,000 square feet of specialized mainframe/data processing space, 24-inch raised floors, a redundant, uninterruptible power supply, 24-hour technical support, triple disaster avoidance systems to back up power, life safety and security systems and six emergency generators.

Design goals for the Newport Financial Center were reached by engineering all critical building systems to maximum redundancy and modularity. The building's central and local self-monitoring systems capabilities offer a level of security that would be extremely costly to duplicate and maintain on an individual basis.

Newport Financial Center tenants include international banks, shipping concerns, insurance operations, brokerage firms, and on-line services companies such as: Morgan Stanley, Instinet (a Reuter company), the Society of Worldwide Interbank, Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT), Mayer & Schweitzer, Inc., a Charles Schwab Company, Hokkaido Takushoku Bank etc.