Designing the Facility of the Future for Port Houston

Port Houston’s Barbours Cut Container Terminal faced a growing need for an updated maintenance facility. Consolidation of multiple maintenance buildings spread throughout the terminal will provide more space for container operations.

HDR’s team, which had previously worked with Port Houston to develop a site plan, designed the new 94,000-square-foot facility.

As a comprehensive design team, HDR was the lead architect and designer, providing the architectural and interior design. The HDR team also provided the structural, civil, mechanical, electrical, plumbing engineering and design, industrial equipment design, communications and security design, fire and life safety design and fueling systems design.

Design Elements

The facility aesthetic and building orientation were important to Port Houston as the facility sits on a key position at the historic City of Morgan’s Point and is highly visible from the Houston Ship Channel. HDR designers embraced this and brought both clean design aesthetic and materials together into a highly functional design. The facility has dedicated space for the vehicles and equipment used by the Port to support terminal operations and bays, shops, and material storage for maintenance needs of those vehicles and other elements of the terminal – such as the rubber-tired gantry cranes, wharf cranes, and spreaders. There are also vehicle and equipment wash and fueling facilities, and a specialized covered maintenance area to support maintenance on the high mast “pencil” forklifts. This area is covered by a 35-foot-high canopy and has the same functionality as the shops inside the building.

Port Houston aimed to incorporate sustainable design elements within the facility, so designers included natural light elements, LED lighting systems, recycled building materials, and reused much of the existing paving and utility infrastructure on the site to reduce cost and to reduce impact on the waste stream during construction.

The design incorporates space for a future administration building, with a plan for utilities and parking when that building is complete. The administration building is part of an overall plan for the area, which HDR also helped create.

The project is scheduled to be completed in 2023.