Welcome to Sprint

Overland Park, Kan.--In this upscale Kansas City, Mo., suburb, Sprint operates its corporate headquarters and product testing labs. Rather than stacking its employees in a downtown skyscraper, the carrier choose to build a "campus" of low-rise buildings that sprawl across 200 acres of an almost rural-like landscape that includes an 8-acre lake and 6,000 trees.

The first buildings were completed in 1997, and the complex continued to grow over the next few years. Before it was built, Sprint occupied almost 50 offices across the Kansas City area. Thus, the goal was to centralize operations and make employee communication more efficient. When construction started in the mid 1990s, it became the largest building project in Midwest history and briefly was the largest building project in the world after Hong Kong's Chek Lap Kok Airport opened in 1998.

Today, the campus houses 7,000 Sprint employees, but has a capacity for double that. Though the population has fluctuated over the past decade, a large influx of employees relocated to Overland Park from Nextel's headquarters in Reston., Va. following the 2005 merger. The campus now has its own ZIP code and would be the 27th largest city in Kansas if it was incorporated.