Tarlton, Barry Real Estate, Skanska land new national archives building contract

From The St. Louis Business Journal. Thursday, September 4, 2008
Lisa Brown contributed to this report

The U.S. General Services Administration has awarded a development contract to Barry Real Estate Cos. Inc., of Atlanta, to complete a build-to-suit lease for a new National Archives and Records Administration building at 1829 Dunn Road in northeast St. Louis County.

Skanska USA Building, also of Atlanta, will partner with St. Louis-based Tarlton Corp to construct the 474,690-square-foot facility. HKS Inc. of Dallas is the lead architectural firm.

The National Archives will relocate from its current offices at 9700 Page Ave. in Overland to the new lease in 2010. Other federal agencies also will use space in the new building. About 650 federal workers will be moving to the new facility, according to a release from the GSA.

Through the GSA, the government has entered into a 20-year lease valued at $19.50 per rentable square foot.

More stringent storage requirements are spurring the replacement of two U.S. National Archives and Records Administration facilities in the St. Louis region. Combined, the new facilities will total nearly 1 million square feet and could cost $65 million to build.

Construction of new facilities is intended to improve the protection of records that can never be replaced. In 1973, more than 16 million Army and Air Force personnel files were destroyed in a fire at the Overland facility, one of the largest losses of archived records in U.S. history.