Meanwhile, Accident Fund established guiding principles it referred to as SMART— Strategically focused, Manage our assets, Attentive to our corporate culture, Responsible corporate citizens, and Take advantage of natural resources. SMART ensured every design charrette and planning meeting met the insurer’s high-performance goals for its new space. Consequently, the building has been certified LEED Gold despite only seeking LEED Certified status.
“We set overall project goals, one of them being a sustainable building,” Gardi explains. “In this case, we designed to meet the SMART goals and then in each stage in the process we pulled out the LEED checklist to determine how we were doing—not the other way around. The integrated design process and a real team approach helped achieve Gold.”
Like a Ship in a Bottle
Those who worked on the project compare it to removing a ship from a bottle and then building another ship within the same bottle. Construction engineer Ruby + Associates Inc., Farmington Hills, Mich., used a laser point cloud to map the inside of the existing building with the new structure. “This was extremely complicated and it couldn’t have been done without BIM [Building Information Modeling],” Gardi says. “The team used hundreds and hundreds of laser points to create a BIM model that was used to build the structure.”
In addition, many of the elements planned for removal—catwalks, elevator/stair shafts, framing and platforms—provided support for the structure, so the team carefully strategized when and from which precise point to remove each element. The team cut two 40-foot-long by 20-foot-wide roof hatches so a crane operator could move about 8,900 pieces of steel in and out of the building while the floors were built from the bottom up. Gardi recalls: “First thing in the morning, the crane operators would lift the hatches off the building and begin lowering all the structural beams in through the roof. We probably moved materials in and out for a year. They were building as the materials came in, starting at the lower level and building up toward the roof.”
The masonry exterior also had its share of challenges, which were complicated by the Ottawa Street Power Station’s 2008 listing on the National Register of Historic Places. The building was built before expansion joints and vapor barriers were typical construction procedures, causing major cracks and out-of-plane walls. Much of the brick had to be dismantled so rust could be removed from columns and steel could receive an epoxy coating before the brick was put back. Where new window openings were cut, the removed brick was used in areas where the original brick had disintegrated past the point of saving.
Further upgrades to the building’s exterior include high-performance windows that meet historical guidelines and an insulated cool roof and light-colored hardscaping, which minimize the building and surrounding area’s heat-island effect.
Even on the interior, the design and construction team maintained as much of the original structure as possible. The 85-ton gantry crane and operator cab that were used to lift parts for boiler and turbine repair still exist inside the facility’s lobby. Brick walls and many of the original steel beams were reused and left exposed to maintain the building’s industrial feel. The team’s thoughtful use of materials and sustainability goals helped it keep 95 percent of construction waste out of landfills.