Tempe Breaks New Ground With $60M Biotech Facility

The agreement between Chesnut Properties and Papago Park Center Inc. opens the door for construction to begin in September on a $60-million, 35,000-sf, three-story lab and a 225,000-sf, class A, environmentally friendly corporate office building on a tract at Mill Avenue and Washington Street near Arizona State University. The multimillion-dollar Papago Gateway Corporate Center will deliver by January 2008.

The project marks the city's first foray into biotech although the fledging industry has taken root in nearby Phoenix with the development of a biotech center in its core. The Tempe project, however, will be the Valley's first privately developed, speculative corporate office building with LEED certification, marking it as an environmentally sensitive "green" building.

"It's going to be awesome," Lee Chesnut of Chesnut Properties says about the project's enviro-friendly design. "This is a speculative project, but it's a class A building and it's special because we're building it in a way that will be different than the typical class A building. The benefits it will give the tenants are tremendous."

Designed by the Smith Group of Detroit, the oldest architectural firm in the US, the six-story office building will be partly wrapped in a double skin-louver system that will shade three sides while still offering views of Tempe Town Lake to the south and Papago Park Buttes to the north. Papago Gateway Corporate Center also has been designed with a full-service cafeteria, fitness center, 900-space parking garage and desert landscaping with reflective ponds.

Chesnut, who anticipates full lease-up within six months of breaking ground, tells GlobeSt.com that he also is in the process of negotiating a second deal to build a 480.000-sf biotech lab building at Papago Gateway Corporate Center. Further details about that project are unavailable, for now.