Penn Center West Building six is a companion building to Building Eight in the same office complex. Both buildings are grouped around a landscape feature pond that serves as an organizing element for the complex. This speculative office building was designed and constructed without the benefit of tenant prospects and was constructed to compete with 1.5 million square feet of vacant office space along the highway corridor between the city of Pittsburgh and the airport. The primary intent of this project was to create an office building that is inherently responsive to sustainability and environmental issues.

The building exterior was designed to convey its characteristics of promoting flexibility and adaptability to meet changing tenant needs through modularity of structure and glazing. Decisions relating to building systems were carefully considered with regard to sustainability. In addition, the design team used this project as the focus of a research project, performed in conjunction with Carnegie Mellon University, to perform energy modeling analysis as a means of comparing alternate building systems with those of a conventionally designed building.