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Design Assist & Architectural Precast Case Studies
Collaborative Design Assist & Architectural Precas ...
Collaborative Design Assist & Architectural Precast Case Studies (AIA 1.0 LU-HSW or up to 1.0 PDH)
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The presentation will start in 30 seconds. Hello, I'm Ray Clark, the Executive Director of Georgia Carolinas PCI. I'll be your moderator for today's webinar titled Design Assist and Architectural Precast Case Studies. This webinar is sponsored by Georgia Carolinas PCI and Gate Precast Company in conjunction with a broader effort by PCI regions across the United States to deliver online learning to design and construction professionals. Be sure to contact your local PCI region to learn more about online learn at lunch opportunities from your forums. Direct information for your local chapter is available via a similar map in the webinar handouts and at pci.org backslash regions. This program is an approved program of both AIA and RCEP. To receive credit, you must attend a full webinar and provide complete registration information. The webinar is registered for one hour of continuing education credit and you will earn one PDH or one HSW learning unit with AIA. If an AIA number was provided at the time of registration, your attendance will be reported to AIA. Within one week of completion of their presentation, you will receive an email from RCEP to download your certificate. If there are any groups in attendance, we do have a group attendance form you can download in the handout section. That can be emailed to Ruth Lehman, whose email address is on the form. Note the continuing education form is only necessary if you are attending as part of a group. For all others, we have your information via the webinar registration. Additionally, a PDF handout of the webinar slides are provided in the GoToWebinar control box. During the presentation, you may ask questions through the question function on your screen. We will have a question and answer session at the end and we'll try to get to as many of your questions as we can. Today's presenter is Mo Wright. Mo is the marketing director for Gate Precast Company. He has worked in the precast industry for 20 years in a wide variety of positions, including precast sales and marketing, estimating, and project management. As marketing director, he was responsible for corporate communications as well as an education program for architects, owners, and contractors regarding the unlimited options of using architectural and structural precast systems and innovative advancements made within the digital realm. This presentation will explore the collaborative design assist process and how it enables project teams to obtain their design goals while maintaining design integrity within budget, as illustrated through a couple of architectural precast project case studies. It will explore collaboration of design and construction teams and the advantages of technologically based BIM, CNC, and module-based forming for mold fabrication. Case studies will include the Perot Museum of Nature and Science with interviews from the design team reflecting on the design assist collaboration of this iconic structure, and One South First, a unique project on the former Domino Sugar manufacturing site in Brooklyn, New York, with collaboration from the architect, developer, and precast fabricator to use research from PCI and Oak Ridge National Laboratory to employ 3D imprinted molds and wood forming techniques for the project's nearly 2,000 prefabricated window units to meet the architect's vision, schedule, and budgetary requirements. With that, Moe, it's over to you. Thank you, Ray. I certainly appreciate your wonderful introduction. Like you said, I'm the marketing director for Gate Precast Company and not the normal marketing director. I came up through operations. I've got about 12 years of field experience. And with that field experience, I came to the sales and marketing side really to do just this, you know, get out and talk to designers, architects, owners, like you said, and get ahead of the contract drawing process and educate as best we can on this custom material. So with that, we'll get started. Learning objectives. We're going to talk about the benefits of design assist and when it's desirable to begin that process. Talk a little bit about BIM because those two things really fit hand in glove. You can certainly have BIM without design assist, but it's really difficult to have design assist without BIM. We're going to talk a little bit about the savings in the construction schedule and other benefits, of course, due to this enhanced collaboration between team members, resources, energy savings, streamlined workflow, and of course, integration of design elements. But the meat and the most fun part of this presentation is the case studies. Like you said, I've got interviews from the design team on the Barreau Museum, which it's always great to hear from those guys. And then I recently was able to integrate some interviews into the case study for the Domino project. So we'll also be able to hear from the stakeholders in that case study. So this is kind of how it's broken up. And we'll get started first with a few projects that are a little, each one of these has like a unique twist to it. This project is Florida International University's, it's their science complex project in Miami. And it was our first opportunity to be able to work and collaborate with a designer and a general contractor back in the late 2000s, working towards a movement to prefabrication. And the element was pre-installed windows. So all the windows that you see on this elevation, albeit a little small, all of them were installed into the pre-cast units prior to delivery to the job site. This next one is the Skolnick Surgical Tower. And this project, its main challenge really revolved around the mold work. You can see the sweeping elevations that happens on three sides of this building. Each one of those elevations contains three different radius points. We were able to obtain those design goals working hand in hand with Michael Zinsman at Canada Design by using our modular mold technique. And I'll get into that and explain what that is during the Perot case study. This next one is the Bryant NYC with David Chipperfield. This is where we discovered that pre-cast, at which we had been polishing pre-cast for several years when we met the Chipperfield design team, but we never considered the fact that it actually is terrazzo. Most of the design community were referring to this project as a terrazzo project. In reality, it is. It's just a very large format terrazzo. Of course, that was the first opportunity for us to be able to really, is the first real job where the entire exterior was polished and really considered terrazzo. We had done lots of projects like this. This is the Nordstrom Retail Facade. I think we're pushing 13 of these now. This was a new layout from the Nordstrom brand, reducing their footprint, moving away from big box stores. And that feature wall and the entry areas also contain polishing. The feature wall feature, you can see it, it has four different finishes at four different profiles. So that's more in line with the way we had been using polishing prior to the Chipperfield project. This one is the Frost Science Museum. Some of you that have visited the PCI website may have seen this on the home page. It's a fantastic project, worked with Grimshaw on this one to develop a program for the planetarium, which is the self-supporting sphere that you see there in the center of the screen. And then, of course, the two pixels, the pixel walls going down either side, those also took advantage of the modular mold technique, which again, we're going to cover in the Pro Museum case study that you see on your screen. And the last case study for today is the Domino project. Now what is in common with all of the projects that you've seen so far is that each one of them had something unique, of course. And the other aspect of it is that each one of them was a design assist project. Each of those things, each of those special features probably would not have been obtained or wouldn't have been, the challenge wouldn't have been met if it was a typical hard bid or standard schematic design, design development, construction documents, you know, process. And it's not just for big projects. All those projects are fairly sizable. We also did this project with Grace Hebert in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, a fairly small project, but working in a design assist collaborative arena, we were able to save the parishioners close to $500,000 and of course, a couple of months on their construction schedule, all using the variegated finishing technique that we use, we call it gate stone. It allows us to be able to replicate that stacked stone look that you see. It was in the effort to match like a hundred-year-old age limestone. And of course, it also features brick integrated into the precast units. For BIM, and most everybody knows this, it gives everyone from the architect to the precast detailer the ability to see a true 3D representation of all of our components and then how they all fit together on the building itself, on the structure, and of course, on site. That joint use of common information reduces the cost of repetitious data creation and data entry, which of course reduces the risk for error and inconsistencies, and it also promotes reliance on information embedded in the model. So you want to, we focus now, most of our projects are at level of development 450 or what people commonly called LOD 450. So all of our information is going into the model. And because of that, we can extract information from the model or series of interrelated models and transfer data between team members quickly for review. This reduction of inconsistencies has an immediate effect on design quality, and BIM of course uncovers dimensional conflicts that plague complicated designs like the case studies that you're going to see later today. The model also yields very useful information for budgeting, constructability, and scheduling as long as you're getting it to the right level of LOD 400 and up. Lately, there's been some advances between the Revit program itself, but also with plug-ins that you're able to obtain and use within the Revit program itself. And for that, we're able to develop a workflow that gives us the chance to automatically populate using plug-ins our panel hardware schedule and the field hardware schedule, which is before that would have been done by hand on a spreadsheet separately outside of our 2D workspace. So again, you can see that as an example of not having that repetitious data entry. And that's a big deal. You know, that's a huge time savings for our draftsmen and of course our QA personnel being able to get their schedules a lot faster. So that's a huge, huge benefit. Now, just lately, you can see the images on the screen. This is a part of the case study later on. The key here is the workflows that have been developed that allow us to be able to obtain the information that's in the model. Typically, you know, everybody knows how BIM works. You have a void that cuts out your profile in the solid object, and we're able to use that void as a solid and transfer that information to our 5-axis CNC machines typically. We also, of course, for this project, use it on a 3D printer, and we'll cover that within the case study. So design assist, the definition, which is really important, there's a lot of definitions floating around out there about design assist and what it is, but this is truly the most accurate. We're in excess of 100 design assist projects at this point, and this to me accurately represents what design assist is, and it's a procurement method by which prior to completion of a design, a construction contract may be awarded on a best value basis pursuant to which a contractor or subcontractor can provide design assistance to the design team and ultimately the owner. It's been called lots of different things, but that's the best definition so far. Now, I've been doing this for 20 years, and I can remember back in the mid-2000s getting phone calls to come to Atlanta or Orlando and, can you look at this set of details? Can you review these connection details? Does this look like it would work? How thick does this panel need to be? And we've all been answering those kind of questions, and we had a conversation about it yesterday in the practice run. Everybody in our industry, all the PCI producers have been doing this for years because it is a custom product, and we have to answer a lot of questions. But the difference between doing that and an actual design assist contract is that we have now a contractual responsibility to understand, coordinate, and provide efficient solutions for the exterior of the facade, but not just the facade. We also need to collaborate with the structural engineer, engineer of record, and other members on the design team to make sure that we're providing an efficient solution for the overall team, not just the precast facade, but also the other subcontractors and stakeholders that we're working with. It's a true team environment. Working in conjunction with the specifier, developing specifications that are tailored to the project, not just a generic spec. So when the contract documents come out and you've got your specification, it is exact to the job. But the big deal and the big motivation is the focus on finding efficiencies pertaining to the facade system for our scope while maintaining the design intent, constructability, quality, and schedule. And the key there, I'm going to, in a couple of slides, design intent. We get through design drawings, get through design details and CDs, and design intent sometimes it takes a hit once you make it to bid time. And I've got a good graphic that'll explain that in a second. Other benefits, the specialty engineer being able to work hand in hand with the EOR, but also true access to modern day forming techniques, generative design tools like Grasshopper. We all have this open canvas to work with in the precast industry, and architects are constantly coming up with new tools and new techniques. And being able to work early in design and ask questions and push for your design intent as an architect to get your vision in concrete. So without that partnership and without a dialogue moving back and forth between subcontractor and designer, it's really more difficult to push to find that edge. And we want that edge push so that we can develop new ideas and new products. So the design team works directly with the design assist team members, of course, to develop finishes. And it's kind of funny, the two case studies we had today, one, they didn't care about the finish at all, and the other, the entire focus was on the finish. So you'll get to see two contrasts there. And then, of course, the LOD 400 or 450 model ready for production at the time construction documents are submitted. So that's super important there. What design assist isn't, what it's not. It's not an alternate delivery system. Delivery is still by the design team, but with insight from us and other manufacturers who specialize in their respective scope. It's not IPD. Although it contains elements of IPD, thank goodness the contractual relationships are very different. It's not design build. The contractor and architects maintain their traditional roles as well as the individual contracted relationships with the owner. And it's not delegated design. Delegated design, that term references when the engineer of record is delegating the design of the precast system to the specialty precast engineer. So the engineer is responsible for turning in counts and all of the connection concepts and designs back to the EOR who integrates it into his contract documents. So this graphic really tells it all, and I love doing this one in person. It's more effective in person because I always ask, on that top line, you see cost established. And that's right at bid. And that's truly the time when an owner, general contractor, and design team understand what their costs are. And I typically ask, how many of your projects at that point are over budget? And get giggles and such because, I mean, it's like 95% of the time. Projects are always over budget. So because of that, you have that risk. And that's the arrow. It could go back to preliminary drawings. It could go back to detail drawings, anywhere in between. But it all represents redesign. And that carries me back to the comment about design intent. So if you move down to the bottom, design assist delivery, you're developing your preliminary drawings, schematic design. Because even before that, you're signed up for a GMP price. We've got a concept. We know what the price is, got a guaranteed maximum price before you go into detail drawings. So at that point, when the contracts are established as a design assist contract, everybody's working with the goal of protecting the design intent of the architect and the rest of the design team. At that point, the owner has seen rendering. They know what their building looks like. And the goal is to make sure that the owner gets what it is that he had in mind when he first signed up. And sometimes when you get to that dead point and you understand your true established costs in the top line, sometimes those images change. And that's the whole thing with design assist, that it protects. It protects both the owner and it protects the architect and the understanding of what their building is going to look like. So that's that part of design assist. And then, of course, there's the huge time savings that you get. You know, in the case of the Domino project, as soon as we finished, you know, the design assist phase and we got to our construction documents, we were able to hit print and have a mold in about 14 hours. So that's huge, huge amount of time saved. So now the fun part. We're going to start the case study and the first one we're going to work with here is the Perot Museum. Let's see here. The architect's statement, of course, is that's from Arnie Emerson. Arnie is one of the principals at Morphosis at the design team there. I'm not going to read that to you, but the bottom line is, is that he's talking about the collaborative workspace. And, of course, that's BIM and what we were talking about earlier. So I am having a little bit of difficulty with my go-to webinar. Give me just a second. I'm going to toggle my monitor here. All right, we should be back in business now. Yep, there we go. Wonderful. Thank goodness. So this is the architect's statement, and we already covered that slide. Now the next, the very next screen is Mr. Tom Main, and he's going to talk to you a little bit about the positives of design assistant. He'll do a lot better job than I do. The thing that was so interesting is, again, architecture is, we're moving so connected to you that we're literally working as a singular entity, producing a product where the product in itself has its own value, separate from our work. And I think that's really interesting. And that's definitely affected us, because we have now any number of projects that are taking place, and we're getting much more aggressive. And this is probably our most kind of aggressive project in that way. We've always been very hands-on in construction, but more in a traditional constructing way. And this one led so particularly to a product with you guys that now it's changed our thinking in terms of how we work particular territories in architecture where we're embedded with you. And that it seemed like we got good response from you. You liked it. So we come at it with a little different particular design attitude. We're interested in technology. We're not going to argue about technical things. We're going to be in the same camp with you. We might have different opinions. And we can have a conversation where we're all in agreement that there's a desire to produce a product at a certain quality for a certain cost, et cetera, where it's a win-win. And everybody's happy. And then, of course, the person that benefits the most is the client, finally. And for both of us, that's, again, that's the goal, right? And it was fascinating. It was a bit of a game changer for us. And it's definitely a model that will continue. And we would have to agree. Sorry for the little bit of a lag. There may be a little bit of a lag in the transfer because of the number of people on the line. But we'll just be patient with this, please. These videos are killer. All right. So for Morphosis and the way that they get to their design, and this particular slide is about Perot, of course. On the top left, that image, that's one of the very first sketches that Mr. Mayne detailed out as inspiration for the design teams. On the top right, that's the artwork, typically creates artwork for inspiration for the teams. In the past, I think he was working with clay. Then he started working with CNC machines. And now he's graduated to 3D printing. So he's constantly, they're growing just like the rest of us are. They break into four-person teams. And each of them has this effort to pull inspiration from those, that piece of art and the sketches. And Xander, Alexander Ten Zeitz, on his team, they came up with an idea of this cube on top of a cube. Now, in these videos, look over their shoulder. And you'll see on the wall behind them and all over the studio are these little, these small models. And that's what these four-people teams are doing. They create these models. And then the studio looks and determines between the different teams, which one most accurately represents the vision for the project. And Xander's team won. And he is the next interview, and he'll talk to you a little bit about what the inspiration, where they, where it came from, and how they tied the Perot Museum design to Texas. You know, like I said, because it's a museum of nature and science, these ideas of kind of geology, of looking at, we were actually looking at sections cut through the Texas landscape. So if you took a section through the earth, and you saw all the different layers of strata, and you saw, you know, the riverbeds, and then the rocks under it, and all the different layers. And we started looking at images like that. And then, you know, because of, you know, the type of work we do, we abstract those. So we're looking at basically images of geological formations in the Texas landscape. And then we're looking at ways of abstracting that. And that was where this idea of these kind of waves on the side of a building came from. And so the waves were really a way of making a dynamic facade that would consistently kind of change look through different types, different times of day, and different times of the year. You know, whether the sun is high in the sky, whether the sun is low, whether it's east or west, drastically changes the reading of the building. And so we were looking for, you know, a material that would allow this variability. And actually, precast concrete has a huge amount of potential for that, because it can really be any shape and any geometry that you want. Hi. Every time I go to shift back to the main screen it gives me a pinwheel, so that's going to be fun today. All right. So integrated project team, it's a play on the term IPD, integrated project delivery of course, but it's all of these things we've pretty much already covered in the design assist portion, but it's for the Perot Museum, the key is that third bullet point, collectively harnessing our talents and insights. We really did optimize the project, and I've got a great example in just a little bit that I'm going to use about the connections, but the main thing that everybody else notices on the outside or the waves on the outside, which Xander was just referencing. So I'll run through about how we got there. The facade concept for us, we had to break it up into three parts, because at this point we had already been through the sampling and the initial ideas and budgeting for the framework, and we knew at this point once we started modeling that we needed to be able to pour the cube with the bulk of the project on one form. So we needed to get that through our modeling department and through detailing as quickly as possible. The atrium, very difficult geometry, especially the pinch point in the center of the atrium, and then of course the plinth was a little bit of a combination of the two, having both concave and convex radius panels. This is a better look at each of the different parts, and you can see that they called this the crux. It's the one where it's kind of the pinch point where everything comes together, but you can also, on top of that, we also had all of the penetrations that we had to deal with between the windows that formed the atrium opening, the escalator, which is the iconic part of the project, and then of course the railings and the stairs and the paths that come in and out of the center point of the museum. So every time, when you come out of a floor and go up to the next one, you're passing through this atrium level. So you come out of the dark area where all the displays are, and then you come right back out into the light and then go back in through the atrium. Really cool experience. If you haven't been there, I highly suggest it. It's fantastic. So the first mock-up that we did, this is it, and being manufacturers that we are, when we were given the original design, we produced it out of wood. We ran the budget numbers and it just didn't work, and we knew we had to do something different. So we went back to the drawing board with our QC manager, Conrad Filo, and our head of operations at that time, Todd Petty, and the two of them came up with an idea. And they ripped apart some papers and curled them and came up with this concept of a module. And this is a relatively old set of pictures, but it's the best way to show you how this works. And it's really a part of history now. This was in 2008. So on the top left, you've got the positive. That's the shape that ultimately we want to get to. We use it to produce our negative that we need for mold work. That material that they're pouring in there is called CONAP. It's a high durometer rubber, very, very durable and very firm so that we can use it over and over again as a mold module. And of course, we inventory it. You can see after they've cured, we've written the mark number on the back of the module there. We inventory them on the tables. They're placed in the mold, like you see there, caulked, and then we put our form oil over the back of it, pour, and then pull it the next morning. And that's the part, you know, we pull it the next morning, some of the rubber pieces come out, some of them stay in the mold, but it doesn't matter because we're going to reconfigure the whole mold anyway. We're going to put all new puzzle pieces back down. It's like a jigsaw puzzle. We put them all back down for the shop ticket. So it's a way, you know, we've been teaching for years, repetition, repetition, repetition. And it's still true in a lot of cases where we have radius pieces, where we have big cornice profiles or columns that we're doing on the front of maybe a university campus building. You want to repeat those as often as possible, or as much as possible, preferably 18 to 20 times. But for something like this, where you've got a fairly flat facade, not necessarily flat, but at least straight, you can use this concept of modules within a form to be able to achieve those goals. And I can refer back to Michael Dinsen's project with Cannon Design. And that's how, you know, that building looks a lot different than this, but it used the same concept, the profile we were able to swap out and give him the different radius points of moving across that facade using this same exact technique. So now the connections, I'm going to go straight to that. The connections here, you can see the tubes that are between the floors there. Our engineer, specialty engineer, worked hand in hand with Atmos Engineering to develop a concept where we were able to thin the exterior beam because we were integrating these tubes in there. Those tubes were necessary because those floor heights are fairly significant. You can see the stairs, they're very, very tall. There's dinosaurs and all kinds of things in this museum. So we asked originally if we could go vertical with the panels, and that was quickly denied. So we had to come up with another way, another concept, and that was being able to put these haunches on the tubes anywhere we wanted to to be able to make our attachment. Whether or not it was gravity connection or a lateral tieback, it really didn't matter. So as soon as we located all the bearing points on all of our shop tickets, we were able to pass this information, this is the key part about finding efficiencies, we were able to pass this information across the desk in a meeting to the miscellaneous steel supplier and get him to price the tube steel instead of us supplying it. We are not a steel fabricator. We're not a steel shop. But they were. So we were able to save a tremendous amount of money to the owner by letting another trade produce connections that we normally would have supplied. So that's a big deal. The last slide of the day is Tom, this is my favorite quote of his, it's the last one for Barov. I was interested in something very simple and generic and raw, and so there's nothing on it. It's just raw concrete. Because I like the idea that we're producing something that's quite beautiful and it's not at all, you don't have to be a rich person to have it. It's completely ordinary and it's about an idea and it's not gold finish. And that was really key to ours. We didn't want it, even in Dallas, we wanted, it's a museum for the people and it in fact was a very economical, it was a very, very economical building to start with. And so we wanted to be, in some ways I guess, protected politically. We didn't want to say we had to spend a fortune to make this building. The money goes into the programs of the, like education today, you're looking at the complete system and it's dangerous to put too much resource on architecture, for architects also. And so we got both things out of it. We got something we thought was incredibly beautiful, it seems to be, again, I was the most surprised the public responded to it. I thought it was going to be really tough, this thing would be really hard to grasp. And it's one of the strangest things, everybody seems to like it, which I was, I was actually blown away. And that it is so simple and they like it, which makes it better yet. It's just, it's made out of vanilla ice cream. I got to go back to my thing. Yeah, that, we were lucky. We were only supposed to interview Xander and Arnie that day and Tom saw what we were doing and left and our record interview, just walk upstairs and sit down with us for about 20 minutes. But we're grateful for him to doing that, because it's nice to be able to share this with everybody to help understand Perot and, you know, it's been a real gift for us. The last case study for today is the Domino Project, but what's really cool about this is that our path on this project really didn't start here. It started here. This is the original research project with the Oak Ridge National Lab, and this is what it was supposed to be. This is a three foot tall by one foot tall wide cornice test piece. That was the scope. That's what we were supposed to do. This is the project we were working on, less than 10,000 square feet, fairly small. The 3D printed part was just the upper cornice that you see there, so it was a nice way to wade into the water, you know, in the shallow end of the pool. But the Landmarks Preservation Commission, working with the design team, it kind of slowed things down, and it kind of missed the window. And this is the path here. You can see right there in March, we had already been working with Cook Fox, the design team, and this is where these two paths intersected, and it was kind of the sweet spot that allowed this whole, it allowed the project to move forward with precast, and it also gave a good testing ground for the technology. And that's when the one foot cornice, it neared the end of testing, it ran into that speed bump, and Oak Ridge wanted something bigger anyway. But we missed the window to do the mock-up, so we had to do the mock-up out of wood. But by the time we got to June, it had all been worked out, and we started working on these kind of things. So we needed what we needed more than anything else, because we were, I mean, remember, this was a three-foot-tall cornice insert, not a five-foot, seven-foot-tall mold for a window opening. So we had a lot of concerns, and it involved warping, it involved the angle of the production, because the cornice piece was just a vertical stack. We were just printing and going vertical. With this, you can see on the right, it's almost like stacking pennies in a weld. We had to work at an angle like that, so all of that had to get worked out. We had to change the bead in order to be able to meet those demands. And of course, the mix, the printing material media itself, originally started out at 18% carbon fiber working on the cornice, and we upped it to the final mix for this project was 20%. One of these molds, if it got damaged, because, of course, this is the first time it had ever been done, we have to shut down molds typically after about 18 pours, do some reconditioning, make sure that the mold is fresh, the lines are clean and sharp. One of the typical molds on this project made it 203 pours without getting touched. And I can assure you, these molds were handled in a plant. They were handled just like we would any other mold, so it gets some rough treatment from time to time. But they proved to be extremely durable. For the project itself, this is the program here. And you can see the Williamsburg Bridge off to the right, and you've got the old smokestack right there. That's the original domino sugar building that they kept. They're using that as a multi-use space. They're renovating it right now, putting a new exterior envelope on the outside, covering some of the areas with the brick. It's a really cool project. And then, of course, our project, One South First and Ten Grand. I'm going to let Hale Everett, he's coming up next, and I'm going to let him talk a little bit about the design. So we're standing at 262 Kent Avenue, which is the northernmost tower on the domino sugar factory site. This is a site that was originally used to refine sugar for the domino company. It was closed in early 2000. And it sat dormant for many years. And Cook Fox came with an idea that was unique, which was to reappropriate the idea of sugar crystals and cubes and use that as a texture or language on the facade. It has the depth and the texture, and it makes a connection to what happened here for many years, which is an interesting narrative and a story that we like. It's also created a rich and interesting facade that we think is unique, both in terms of its texture, which I think is a connection to the sugar cubes, both for its color, both for its refraction of light, and also its depth. Yeah, one of the cool things about Hale Everett and Two Trees is Hale is actually a registered architect. He was the project architect. Two Trees, as a developer, is its own construction management firm. So it was a wonderful experience to be able to work hand-in-hand with a construction management firm that had an architect on staff and Cook Fox. So it was a great environment to develop a unique facade like this. And like you mentioned, it was based on sugar, based on the facets of sugar. And that's what the mix design was based on, is our Miami white mix design. So it uses a pure white sand and pure white cement, and with a mix design that included a granite that complemented the white in the mix, the matrix. So it worked out really nice. For the exterior elements, Pam Campbell and her team at Cook Fox, they did a sun study to comply with the green building law for shading elements. They integrated frits on the top and bottom of the windows, and they changed the profiles from the different elevations of the facade. The east and west were typical. That's kind of what you see in the image on the right, the printed piece there. That's what all of the panels look like on the east and west. The south facade, the lower, or the horizontal elements protruded. They were proud, if you will, of the face closest to the window. And then the north facade had vertical elements that were proud. So in doing that, they were able to qualify the precast envelope as a shading element pushing the footprint of the building out to the lot line. So that was fantastic. It gave two trees back a lot of leaseable space, and it worked out really nice. This here, this is the family that was created. Our managing director calls it an intelligent family. Putting this much information into the family for the windows, this is the 11'2 tall window. All the 11'2 tall windows were done using this one interface. So we had a team of modelers that ranged in experience levels but could go through this family and quickly develop the details for each of the different windows and the rotation of the bowls and direction you saw it all. Really cool, really cool process. We were able to make changes on the fly very quickly with overall heights to meet floor-to-floor demands like where the upper levels met at the top where the gym is located, the glass portion. We had to adjust that about two weeks before we were headed into fabrication. And in the old way, that would have freaked everybody out. That mark number would have gone on hold, but because of the workflow and the 3D printing and everything, we never missed a beat. So the workflow itself, this is what it looks like. This is the really cool part of it. We develop our model to LOD 450, we export the void as a solid in Revit, pass it through Inventor and get the information to drive the 3D printer and the 5-axis CNC machine. And that whole process paired with the manufacturing of the mold and on equipment that doesn't care what time of day it is, it allowed us to be able to quickly get the molds that we need to be able to meet the delivery dates and the demands of the schedule because it was very fast. This I've got one more video I'm going to show you from Pam Campbell, and she's going to talk to you a little bit about the idea of 3D printing and there. We knew that Gate was capable of creating some very high end finishes. So we started working through some samples with them very early on and were very happy with the finishes. The amazing thing about concrete is you can pour it into any shape, but you've got to have that shape to pour it into. And generally, when you're relying on carpenters to make wooden forms, we felt it was important that there'd be a lot of variation and articulation in the facade. And that required a number of different mold shapes, which the solution to that Gate really came up with. They proposed that we could have far more rapidly made and reusable forms that would create the articulation that we wanted. If we use this large format 3D printing to create the molds instead of traditional carpentry, which was completely new to us, and it was very exciting and it eventually made affordable the articulation that we wanted for the facade. So these are the machines. This is the actual work that was going on. On the left-hand side, that was the Oak Ridge National Lab machines made by Cincinnati. It had a printing area of around 12 foot by 5 1⁄2 foot by 3 foot. The one on the right, a little bit of a bigger machine, it would allow it as a printing area of 12 by 5 1⁄2 by 6 foot. So it had a little bit more capacity for some of the larger panels that we were working with. And that's, it looks a lot like an inkjet printer, but a very oversized inkjet printer with a lot different materials. The molds themselves, of course, if you paid attention earlier with the details, the facets were really important. And so the facets are what's integrated into the vertical portions of these molds that are providing the block out. And that was the architectural feature, the window mold. So if you look on the right, you've got these posts that you see there that were integrated into the design of the molds themselves. You can see the vibrators, those hoses that are on the inside of the mold there, they're attaching to the vibrators that are attached to those posts. And we're shaking these pieces from the inside out. Now what's really cool about that is vertical pours, 20 inch vertical pours like this, old way, probably would have had a few bug holes. We normally attach these vibrators to the tables and shake the whole table. If we had had wood molds that we were doing this with, it would have shaken and rattled the wood apart and the molds would have leaked. So we could not have done it this way without having these one piece molds like this. So it was really cool. And being able to do that gave us these super crisp edges and a near porcelain finish at form finish. Now the porcelain was beautiful, but it did not meet the design intent. So we acid etched those inner pieces to give them the sugar cube texture that they were looking for. And of course you see on the outside, that's the polish. So having that sharp edge where the polish meets the acid etch lined up with the sharp edges of the mold itself, you know, because those things were super crisp being machined by a 5-axis. Now the other aspect of this and being a design assist job and being able to collaborate like this, we were able to take all of the windows for the project and install all of the windows into the precast for the exterior facade. Now the corner ones, we installed those on site at a pad that we had ready. But all of the standard units, every single one of them was installed at our manufacturing facilities in Oxford and Lexington, Oxford to North Carolina, Lexington, Kentucky. And you can see Hale's quote there. I called Hale to find out, hey, how much money did we save? And he couldn't answer the question because the minute we said yes, they never looked at it any other way. But the key there is understanding that we would have held up time on the buck hoist. We would have held up time on the floors. The window guy would have been laying out all his materials on the floors right along the perimeter, installing windows. Because doing it this way, they were able to go straight into interior build out. And that was what was more motivating than anything else for Hale. So we had to wait 10 years or a little bit more than 10 years to be able to do it again. But now we've got this great example and we're seeing more and more requests of people wanting to do pre-installed windows. I mean, it's happening weekly now. So that's great. Pre-fabrication is great. A few images of the project, final images here. This is the last image that I've got for the project. You can see it's an absolutely breathtaking job. It was a winner this year, was the honorable mention in the Harry Edwards Industry Advancement Award for the workflow and the 3D printing in addition to the pre-installed windows. And the finishes, of course. So the very last slide, bring it back. It's all about this right here. This graphic tells the story and it tells you how we were able to do all the projects that you've seen today. And with that, we'll turn it over to questions. Okay, Mo. Thank you very much. Great presentation. We'd have time maybe for just a couple of three questions, so I'm going to jump right into it. The first question is, does a design assist subcontractor necessarily get the actual construction contract? And the second part of that question, or is a design assist contract separate? Typically, it is going to be a two-phase contract. We've had the luck and luxury of having experienced this a couple of different ways. We've done formal bids, like hard bids, publicly funded projects in states that have passed best value. So that process typically is going to be, they put out a schematic design set of documents. You've got a good idea of what the scope's going to be. You put together a GMP price and a design assist proposal that outweighs your program, your design assist program. So they get to evaluate how your design assist process works, as well as what your pricing, how your pricing comes in. So they make their decision based on those two aspects, and then award a contract for design assist, and it always has a second part. So as long as we meet or beat that GMP price, then we move into phase two, which is the manufacturing and installation of the precast units. So the first deliverable is an LOD 400 plus model that has the ability to generate shop tickets. So hopefully that answers the question. Okay. Thank you. And we have time for one more. And just as an FYI, folks, if we did not get to your question or you still have some questions, please continue to put those in the question box, and we'll be able to answer those offline. The last question, Moe, is can design assist be used in a public bid situation with design bid build? Yeah, exactly like the one that I just described. We've got the best example, the most recent example is the Georgia Supreme Court new courthouse designed by Stevens and Wilkinson. That project was funded by the state of Georgia and was put through a competitive bid process using the exact same process that I just described, which was putting in a design assist package with a GMP price. And that's how that project was built. Incidentally, it also was a PCI Design Award winner this year. Great. Well, just as a wrap up, I want to thank everybody for attending the webinar today. Thank you especially to Moe for taking the time to share your expertise with us today. Just a reminder to attendees that you will be receiving an email from RCEP to download your Certificate of Completion. Please be sure to complete the one-minute survey at the conclusion of this webinar. This also provides an opportunity for you to ask additional questions or request follow-up. And be on the lookout for an email announcing our next webinar on precast pavements, which will be held on Thursday, March 25th at 1 o'clock p.m. Eastern Standard Time, titled Efficient and Low-Impact Rehabilitation Using Precast, Pre-Stressed Concrete Replacement Slabs. The presenter will be John Grafton, PE, with DSI International USA. Thank you, everyone, and have a great rest of your day.
Video Summary
The video content is a presentation on design assist and architectural precast case studies. The presentation is hosted by Ray Clark, the Executive Director of Georgia Carolinas PCI, and the moderator for the webinar. The webinar is sponsored by Georgia Carolinas PCI and Gate Precast Company, in collaboration with other PCI regions in the United States. The webinar is an approved program for both AIA and RCEP credits. The presenter, Mo Wright, the marketing director for Gate Precast Company, discusses the benefits of design assist, including collaboration, access to modern forming techniques, and cost savings. He also highlights case studies, including the Perot Museum of Nature and Science and the Domino Project, to demonstrate how design assist enables the achievement of design goals within budget and the use of innovative advancements like 3D printing for mold fabrication. The video includes interviews with members of the design team, who discuss their inspiration and vision for the projects. The video also showcases the workflow for creating precast elements, including the use of 3D printing and 5-axis CNC machines. Overall, the video emphasizes the importance of collaboration and design assist in achieving architectural precast projects efficiently and effectively.
Keywords
design assist
architectural precast
case studies
Ray Clark
webinar
Gate Precast Company
collaboration
cost savings
3D printing
efficiency
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