The media research company opens its new Oldsmar headquarters to exclamations over its grandeur.
By AARON SHAROCKMAN
Published October 2, 2003
[Times photos: Libby Volgyes]
Amy Rettig, client services manager, checks to see if a giant mural of I Love Lucy characters is dry at Nielsen Media Research's new Global Technology and Information Center in Oldsmar.
Mark Brown, a computer operator, works in the command center of the Nielsen Technology Center. Brown was monitoring the servers and client sites. Builders say the center can withstand a category 5 hurricane.
OLDSMAR - When executives at Nielsen Media Research decided to consolidate their Pinellas County operations two years ago, they asked architects for a new campus to match the company's high-tech character.
They wanted sleek, clean and corporate. Not ostentatious.
"There's a fine line between elegance and opulence," said Albert Alfonso, the principal architect who took pains overseeing every inch of the Global Technology and Information Center, which was christened at a ceremony Wednesday.
So Nielsen spent $80.2-million - $30-million more than the Church of Scientology, another major player in north Pinellas County, spent on its Super Power building, where regality was required - to create a headquarters that wasn't opulent or ostentatious.
Yet to opening day visitors, Taj Nielsen is both. And they said that's okay.
"This is incredible," said Oldsmar Mayor Jerry Beverland, looking up at the building. "The design is remarkable."
About 1,000 people attended the ceremony marking the completion of the first phase of Nielsen's 18-month move and celebrating the company's new 475,000-square-foot home. This year, construction will start on the second phase of the project, an additional 140,000-square foot building that will house many of the employees who are still working in Nielsen's Dunedin operations center.
Construction will be completed by 2005.
By then, more than 1,600 Nielsen employees will be located at the 39-acre corporate campus that records TV viewership patterns from all over the country and Canada.
The new digs are vastly different from Nielsen's old home.
"It was Brady Bunch there," said client services manager Amy Rettig, laughing about Nielsen's outdated 211,000-square-foot headquarters on Patricia Avenue in Dunedin. "This is not Brady Bunch."
Alfonso, of Alfonso Architects of Tampa, made sure of that.
"Here was this quiet little company doing this huge national thing and they had the space of a family business," Alfonso said. "When I would go over there I would laugh. There was always a disconnect of what people outside thought of Nielsen and what that campus looked like."
Starting with the outside of the building, every detail reflects Nielsen's place at the intersection of technology and entertainment. Panes of glass are designed to mimic computer punch cards the company used at its main Dunedin facility.
There are four different tempers of glass, all designed to glow a different hue in Florida's southern sky.
Inside walls feature classic moments for the TV audience that Nielsen measures. East-west corridors include 10-foot tall pop-art of scenes from I Love Lucy, The Honeymooners and an appearance by the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show.
Other walls are color-coded to help people navigate the building, which is 1,000 feet long and four stories tall. Red walls signal bathrooms. Gray is the mark of an elevator bay. Four hollowed pillars accented with Mexican mosaic tiles act as reference points and town centers on each floor.
"In a building this big, it's easy to get lost," Alfonso said.
Alfonso was in charge of everything, down to the paintings that hang on the walls. He did 10 of the paintings himself and surprised employees by placing a half-dozen replicas of works by 17th-century Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer on a lobby wall surrounded by art modern and chic enough to come from The Matrix.
"I get so many comments about that lobby," Alfonso said. "It was kind of a whimsical thing I did."
There's also an expansive cafeteria and patio overlooking woodlands and a retention pond-turned-minilake. A bronze statue of Poseidon watches over Nielsen's private sea.
"There's what you expect from an American office building and then there's this," Alfonso said. "This is a little off, and I love it."
The Nielsen Technology Center, a 25,000-square foot part of the building that will house 600 servers storing TV viewership patterns across the country, has security measures like a military installation. Emergency walls can drop down to isolate the servers and the command center in seconds, and the servers are off-limits.
It's so safe that area emergency officials have asked to use it as a base in the event of a catastrophic storm. Builders say it can withstand a category 5 hurricane.
There are 48 isolated, sound-proof phone booths that let employees make important phone calls away from the hum of office space.
Nielsen president and chief executive officer Susan Whiting called the building a "splendid creation."
"This building is one of the biggest events in the company's history," Whiting said. "This space was designed to be creative, open and innovative. It's certainly all three."
Nielsen Media Research, a descendent of the A.C.Nielsen Co. founded in 1923, is the world's leading provider of television audience measurement. It monitors and reports findings from more than 5,000 households on when a TV set is on, to what channel and, with its People Meter, who is watching.
