Garage Mahal

University of Houston Ramps Up With New Parking Facility

By Lesley Hensell

Not all parking garages are created equal. Especially at the University of Houston, where a new mixed-use parking structure, with its complex construction scheme, will offer plenty of parking space as well as finished-out areas dedicated to retail and academics when it reaches final completion this month.

Built on an existing surface parking lot at Calhoun Road and University Drive, the $25.8 million garage encompasses 519,000 sq. ft. over five levels. It provides 1,500 parking spaces, as well as a 25,000-sq.-ft. academic and welcome center and 10,000 sq. ft. for retail use on the building's first floor.

The garage is a "mixed-use structure that will help to enhance campus life," said Dave Irvin, associate vice chancellor and associate vice president for facilities and plan operations at the University of Houston. "There will be great synergy with all parts of the building - retail, the visitors' center and the academic center. Visitors will be able to buy tickets for different events on campus, while prospective students and parents will be able to learn more about admissions and financial aid."

advertisement

The garage relies on express ramps, which raised the degree of difficulty for its design and construction.

"With this design, there are flat decks with an express ramp at one end," said Matt Elliott, project manager for SpawGlass of Houston, the general contractor. "This creates a more efficient flow of traffic and a larger area of flat deck. The flat deck is attractive from a constructability standpoint, but the express ramp is pretty complicated."

Unlike regular ramps in garage designs, express ramps are intersected by deck columns at different heights on different levels of the structure. As a result, it was more difficult to design, form, reinforce and place the columns, Elliott said.

"The express ramp design has several advantages," Irvin said. "First, it allows a clear view of every floor of the garage, which is key to enhancing security. Also, our master plan is to expand the garage in the future. With this design, we can simply add more flat parking space on the other side of the ramp using a single ramp to quickly load the entire garage."

Work on the fast-track project launched in January 2005, and the parking portion of the facility opened just 12 months later - ahead of schedule and just in time for the spring semester. To accomplish this, the SpawGlass team set up an aggressive pour schedule for the garage's cast-in-place concrete structure. Each of the garage's 109,000-sq.-ft. decks was split into five sections of approximately 25,000 sq. ft. each.

"To cycle the formwork properly and meet the schedule, we created a 25-week pour schedule," Elliott said. "In most cases, we worked after-hours for the formwork and reinforcing placement. All concrete placements were started at 1 a.m. on a Friday morning."

This late-night schedule helped the team work effectively in a congested university environment by allowing concrete staging, off-loading and clean-out at less-active times.

"By Monday morning at 7 a.m., the cylinders were broken at the testing lab," Elliot added. "That gave us the rest of the week to wreck the formwork and move on to the next two areas to get ready for the next Friday-morning pour."

To ensure that there was enough time to move on to the next area, the team invested in a premium 4,000 psi mix that guaranteed a 3,000 psi break within three days. That way, the team could start stressing post-tensioned cable within three days.

"A couple of times, to speed things up, the lab broke cylinders on Sunday mornings," Elliott said. "We did end up working quite a few weekends."

As the team worked through concrete pours, project managers took extra care to document the locations of post-tensioned cables, which became particularly important as work began on the finish-out of the first-level indoor spaces, Elliott said.

"Since the finished spaces are on the first level, we knew there would be a lot of equipment and materials hanging from the deck above," he said. "Since it is full of post-tension cables, there was a big concern that one of these cables could be ruptured when subcontractors went to anchor a piece of equipment in the deck above.

"We went to great lengths to identify cables so that, when we started building out below, it would be easy to know exactly what was going on."

For the columns on the project, SpawGlass chose white Portland cement for its lighter color. But the quick-setting nature of the cement required tweaks to forming and placement techniques.

"That mix in and of itself is kind of volatile, so we had to play with it to keep it workable long enough to pour the columns and make them look good," Elliott said.

In addition to more convenience, the parking garage will offer additional security to students and staff. Administrators have installed video cameras and blue-light security phones throughout the garage, and a University of Houston police officer is stationed at the building. The lighting is nearly twice that in an average garage.

Nestled among oak trees, the garage was designed to aesthetically match other campus buildings. It features a skin of face brick, glazed tile and cast stone.

"Inside and out, the garage was built to be much more than simply a place to park," Elliott said. "It truly enhances the campus around it."