Redwood Business Center Park
Creative minds work best when they can freely collaborate without barriers imposed by the distance between work locations. Cyan Optical, Inc, showed its office design inventiveness when its owners reorganized the software superstar’s workspace in the Redwood Business Center Park in Petaluma in 2013.
Cyan’s interior design in the Basin Street Properties building at 1383 McDowell Blvd. provided phone-booth-like work stations for individuals and pairs, as well as modular team rooms that could be reconfigured to accommodate staff for a variety of project types.
The company’s innovative spirit paid off, and its teams developed groundbreaking network software. Blue Planet revolutionizes how on-line businesses expand network capacity to serve their mushrooming mobile customer base.
In 2014, Cyan needed to add office space to accommodate its growing business. Occupying the entire third floor of the first building at Redwood Business Center (1383 McDowell Blvd.), Cyan envisioned spreading its wings across to a new building that developer Basin Street Properties planned at the site (1385 McDowell Blvd).
Tying two buildings together
Basin Street asked ATM Engineering to design a third-floor walkway to tie together the existing building with the new office structure, also to be three stories. Designing such a bridge is not a challenge the structural engineering firm staff takes on every day.
To merge the two buildings, the structural engineers devised an elegant and secure plan. They specified the removal of a chunk of the original building’s outer concrete wall to make a space to integrate the bridge.
Next, the plans called for drilling holes in the existing wall and filling them with epoxy and steel reinforcement bars. The concrete wall could then be bolted to the steel beams that span the length of the skyway and attach to the new building structural support.
Cyan moved into the new building’s top floor in February of 2015. Its staff can freely move from one building to another without mounting stairs or taking a ride in an elevator. Both Redwood Business Center buildings sport the Cyan company name.
To capitalize on Cyan’s success, another telecommunications company, Ciena, purchased Cyan in August 2015 and established a separate division to continue development and marketing of the Blue Planet product.
