RL Cold Baytown.

Project brief

RL Cold - Baytown, TX is a cold storage and third-party logistics facility of about 283,000 square feet at 6455 East Grand Parkway South in Baytown, Texas. It sits on 27 acres in TGS Cedar Port Industrial Park, a 15,000-acre master-planned industrial district served by rail and barge near the Grand Parkway and Cedar Port Parkway. RealtyLink developed the project through its cold storage division, RL Cold, and Primus Builders delivered it as design-build contractor. No separate architect is named. Maersk is the end user, and the building is its first cold storage project in the United States.

RealtyLink chose the site because the Houston area has far less cold storage capacity than Dallas-Fort Worth. The Port of Houston and Union Pacific and BNSF rail lines are close by. The building has freezers that convert between -10° and 35°, a blast freezer for protein products, and a 90-foot-deep truck dock. The office is clad in architectural metal panels. To meet a 150 mph wind standard with projectiles, the design uses quadruple-pane windows, deeper and more closely spaced steel columns, and a second-floor moment frame that reduces the number of columns. The facility is listed as LEED Silver. Construction was underway in January 2022, with completion scheduled for August 2022.

BOGZA produced an aerial daylight exterior rendering of the facility. It shows a long cross-dock building with trucks at the docks on both sides and offices at one corner. The entry road curves through landscaped buffers toward the building.