RNGD, Wes Palmisano’s fast-growing Metairie-based construction firm, has been selected by the state of Louisiana to deliver a new $84 million office building in Harvey that will replace the existing state office building on the West Bank Expressway.
The two-story building, which will encompass 116,000 square feet, will be constructed, at least in part, using modular, or prefabricated, construction – a method that RNGD has increasingly utilized in residential and commercial projects over the past five years because it saves time and money.
“Through innovative approaches like offsite manufacturing and prefabrication, we’re able to deliver a higher-quality building more cost-efficiently and on an accelerated timeline,” said Joe Yenni, RNGD Executive Vice President-Building.
The state contract is the latest of several positive developments for RNGD. The company started the new year with a move to its new 14-acre campus on L&A Road near the Earhart Expressway and saw record growth in the months that followed. It opened a Mississippi office – in addition to offices it already has in Alabama and Tennessee – and snagged a contract to work on the site of the Meta AI data center in Richland Parish.
It finished the year with a backlog – the total dollar value of work a company has but has not completed yet – of more than $500 million.
Among RNGD’s signature projects of the past 12 months was the completion of a five-story office building in Huntsville, Alabama’s historic downtown, where it is developing a mixed-use district.
RNGD construction installs a manufactured steel wall panel at a job site in May 2025 in Huntsville, Alabama.
The company completed the five-story, 75,000-square-foot building in just two months using modular building methods that involved shipping more than 450 tons of structural steel and nearly 200 exterior wall panels from its 90,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Metairie to the job site.
In all, the method shaved nearly four months off the construction timeline, the company said.
RNGD intends to bring the same kind of efficiencies to the project in Harvey, where it is currently managing the preconstruction phase of the project and is expected to lead in the construction phase once it gets started.
“This project represents our ongoing commitment to advancing Louisiana’s infrastructure and serving the communities where we live and work,” Palmisano said in a prepared statement.”
Building-in-a-box
Amid rising construction costs and a housing affordability crisis, modular building has become a hot topic of late and is growing in popularity. Still, its overall share of construction projects in the U.S. is relatively small, at just over 10%, according to the Construction Industry Training Board.
Wes Palmisano, third generation owner of the New Orleans construction company that has gone from post-World War Two housebuilder to one of the city’s major builders, with landmark projects like the Ace Hotel New Orleans on Carondelet Street.
Palmisano is trying to change that. As he has grown the family construction company started by his grandfather, Warren Palmisano, he has increasingly focused on modular building, changing the company’s name nearly three years ago to RNGD – pronounced renegade – to reflect the shift in focus. At the same time, he bought the Metairie campus to have more space for manufacturing and training facilities.
The process involves prefabricating building components, including wall panels, frames, sheaths, and exterior coverings offsite in a factory. The components are digitally tracked through each stage of production, allowing quality control and productivity data to be captured and analyzed. That data is then used to ensure proper building component performance and better design for future projects, company spokesperson Michael Fulkerton said.
A rendering of the interior of a new $84 million state office building planned for Harvey.
Once components are ready, they’re flat packed and transported to a job site.
It’s too soon to say how much of the new state office building in Harvey will be constructed using modular components
“As part of preconstruction, we will be assessing opportunities for offsite prefabrication where appropriate and effective in driving value for the project,” Fulkerton said in a statement.
in the coming months, the company will be evaluating whether prefabricating parts of the Harvey office building in Metairie will improve schedule certainty, quality control, jobsite safety, and cost management.
The building is being designed by Peer Trapolin. It is expected to be complete by Dec. 2028.
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