Over the past year, the long-anticipated City Center development in downtown Lexington has quickly taken shape. The main high rise is mostly under glass, and this month construction teams are completing work on the structural shell for the two new hotels on the block: the 216-room Lexington Marriott City Center and the 120-room Residence Inn Lexington City Center. Observers may have noticed that the concrete-and-steel frame for the interconnected hotels has risen more swiftly than usual, thanks in large part to a design-build solution by locally based Bristol Group that relies on off-site construction for most of the structural components.
“We have been able to accomplish the structural shells at City Center with about a third of the labor force that conventional construction would require,” said John-Mark Hack, vice president of business development for Bristol Group. “And we were able to shave a considerable amount of time off their construction schedule.”
Bristol’s plan for the project incorporated precast concrete wall panels built at the company’s own fabrication facilities, transported on flat-bed trucks and erected on site. The panels were combined with hollow-core concrete floor planks and an interlocking framework of composite steel beams and columns premanufactured in Canada by the Finland-based company Peikko. “It’s the highest deployment of that composite steel structural frame in the United States, and it’s very well suited to be paired up with our precast panels,” Hack said.
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Bristol has built its business on engineering that incorporates new and established construction techniques to best fit client needs, Hack said. The 22-year-old company was started by Todd Ball, a two-degree engineer who launched the design-build firm in 1996 as a merged services solution for clients. With architects and engineers on staff, the firm can streamline the time required and significantly reduce the likelihood of cost-increasing change orders down the road, Hack said. “The overriding philosophy of the company is that construction is a service—not a commodity,” he said. Bristol’s project portfolio spans multiple industries, including industrial distribution centers, automotive manufacturing plants, hotels and hospitality, and food and beverage facilities. Although it employs a variety of construction options for different clients, precast concrete has been the answer for a growing number of its customers, Hack said. To meet the need, Bristol Group opened its own precast concrete facility in the mid-2000s on a five-acre lot on Old Frankfort Pike. In the fall of 2017, it expanded that capability with a multimillion-dollar investment in a precast concrete fabrication facility in Charlestown, Indiana, just across the river from Louisville.
By their nature, construction projects are often fraught with uncertainty, exposed to unfavorable weather conditions and subject to increasingly critical labor shortages across the industry. The use of precast concrete can reduce a lot of those risks and standardize production quality, Hack said, by building major components year-round in a climate-controlled and predictably scheduled indoor facility. Pre-building components in a controlled environment also means the process can be engineered to achieve optimal levels of quality, durability and energy efficiency in each piece. “It enables us to have a much higher degree of control over the entire construction process,” he said.
Changing course on City Center
Bristol’s off-site construction approach wasn’t the initial plan for City Center’s hotels, said Dudley Webb, board chair and co-founder of the Webb Companies, the project developer. Originally, Webb Companies had intended to partner with Hunt Construction Group for a conventional build, known in the industry as “cast-in-place,” for the two hotels. The adjacent 12-story office tower on the site is being constructed by the Wilburn Group, using such conventional methods as well.
The developer had to switch gears for the hotels, however, when Hunt’s team was diverted by a larger project—the construction of a new stadium for the Los Angeles Rams. With the construction of the underground parking garage already underway, project coordinator Ralph Coldiron connected Webb Companies with the Bristol Group and their alternate solution for moving the project forward, Webb said.
Speed of installation was a key selling point, he said, with the projected opening for the development planned to coincide with this year’s fall meet at Keeneland. While precast construction is fairly new in the United States, the process has built a strong track record across the Atlantic, where it has been in use for more than a half-century. “With the projects in Europe, they could complete about a floor per week,” Webb said.
Even the bathrooms at City Center’s hotels will be manufactured offsite by another company and brought as whole rooms to be connected into the structures. Webb said that the ability to pre-build elements and work through the weather has saved the Webb Companies both time and money on the project—even as 2018 shaped up to be one of the wettest years on record for Kentucky. “It’s been kind of a learning curve for everybody, but the end result makes it all worth it,” he added. “We think it’s going to be a gamechanger for downtown.”
Bristol Group engineers were assigned to design and oversee each of the different components required for the project and coordinated their efforts as the walls were being built to order on the factory floor. “It is virtually a zero-waste building product, because every one of the precast panels that are utilized in the two hotels at City Center were made specifically for that project,” Hack said. “Every panel is rigorously engineered to make sure it is the right size, the right weight and the right dimension.”
With a lot of the standard on-site engineering work already pre-built into the components, the on-site work centered on assembling them like puzzle pieces into a sturdy, interlocked design. The team was able to go vertical on two hotels simultaneously with about 27 workers on site, said TJ Chin, Bristol’s project manager for City Center. Chin estimated that a conventional build would have required more than double the workforce. “Having all that work done ahead of time has been a major component in allowing me to be successful,” Chin said.
Because the City Center project was initially planned as a conventional build, the Bristol team had to work within some of the site’s already established parameters, such as the capacity and positioning of the large cranes that were already in place, Chin said. Larger precast panel designs that the company would usually have employed were divided into more manageable sections to accommodate the equipment. A few small wall sections were cast conventionally on-site, too, because the location and weight of the required pre-cast components would have been beyond the range of crane accessibility. Even still, the project team found themselves at times waiting for the much smaller, conventionally cast sections to catch up, Chin said.
Chin gained experience in cast-in-place concrete construction prior to joining Bristol Group two years ago. With precast concrete, the amount of coordination required on the project is more manageable, and the team can generally work through any weather conditions that will allow the crane to operate, he said. In terms of quality, he added, it’s also easier for construction team members to give their best effort when they are not working long hours to make up for the downtime or rushing to catch up from weather delays. “It does minimize the magnitude of mistakes,” Chin said.
Building on its competitive position
Bristol Group currently employs 150 people, including its team of architects and engineers at the company’s Lexington headquarters on Delaware Avenue, as well as employees at its precast concrete fabrication facilities and additional field personnel. Hack sees room for the business to continue its steady growth. With only about a half-dozen design-build firms in the country that own their own precast fabrication facilities, Bristol Group is well positioned to employ the technology, when advantageous, to a growing number of potential clients across the region, Hack said. “We can be competitive and economical within 150 miles of our production facility,” he said. That extends outside of its established Kentucky markets, stretching to Columbus, Ohio; Indianapolis and Nashville.
But precast concrete fabrication is one useful capability in a wider repertoire of solutions-oriented options for Bristol, Hack noted. “As we have become more established in the precast world, our growth has been steady,” Hack said. “But we are solutions-minded. We aren’t handcuffed to one mindset.”
Still, Bristol’s work on City Center has allowed the company to demonstrate the technology’s capabilities to a broader audience of potential clients and show how it can be incorporated into future projects, Hack said. It has opened possibilities for some exciting new applications in vertical construction in urban areas within the region, and based on the current activity, pre-cast concrete in the United States is only going to gain traction.
“Offsite construction, in general, is going to be a big part of construction going forward,” Hack added. “We feel we are positioned well to take advantage of trends in the industry.”
By the Numbers
Components produced off-site and assembled on-site in the construction of the Marriott and Residence Inn hotels at City Center include:
1,025 Steel columns and beams
2,848 Precast hollow-core floor planks
2,848 Precast concrete shear walls and solid slabs
131 Precast staircase pieces