“At 12’6”, we thought the typical height would suffice, but the owners wanted to be completely sure there would be no problems,” says Alarcon. The structure’s one key adaptation was making the first level twice the regular height, 26 feet, to create a loading dock at the rear of the facility and ensure any delivery vehicles would have access. Cast-in-place concrete would have required many more.” “Using precast concrete, we could create the design for this very large project with only one expansion joint. “It worked very well with our bay sizes,” he says. Noli Alarcon, vice president at TimHaahs, the architect/engineer on the project, agrees. “The 62-foot-long double-tees, at a 12.5-foot width, worked out perfectly for our bay design.” “It was less expensive than alternatives we reviewed by a significant amount,” he says. Precast concrete was chosen for several reasons, leading off with economics, says Steve O’Connor, senior project manager for Tishman Construction Co., the construction manager. Blakeslee Prestress fabricated and erected the components. The design features double tees, inverted tee beams, columns, shear walls, vertical shear walls, horizontal lite walls, spandrels embedded with thin brick and with a sandblasted finish, stairs, slabs, and wall panels with a formliner to achieve a limestone look. The project, on a 300- by 600-foot footprint, consists of an eight-level structure containing 1.16 million square feet to park 3,400 cars.

To meet these needs, they specified a total-precast concrete structural system. They needed an economical approach that met all the functional requirements while blending with the nearby historical buildings and constructing it in the busy downtown area. The design-build team for the MGM Resort Casino in downtown Springfield, Massachusetts, faced several challenges in constructing the large parking structure that supplements the new adjacent casino.

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