CTroyMathis
15 March 2002, 02:23 AM
Luxury High Rise Bringing Bit of Paris To Dallas
Vendôme Condominium Tower On Schedule For July Completion
By Mark Rea
A bit of Parisian flair is coming to the Turtle Creek area of Dallas as work progresses on the Vendôme Condominium Tower. Named for the luxurious Hotel de Vendôme located near the Louvre in Paris, the $90 million Vendôme tower will feature 119 high-end condominium units on its 2.09-acre location. Manhattan Construction Co. of Dallas is the general contractor for the 20-story, 611,757-sq.-ft. project developed by The Setai Group, based in New York City. With a target completion date of July 29, the project was 70 percent complete at the beginning of February.
"Everything is definitely on schedule for the target completion," said Manhattan project manager Neil Dostie. "We've hit our target dates throughout the project from groundbreaking to topping off last November. Of course, that makes it sound like this has been an easy project so far. That's not been the case. This has been an extremely challenging project." Since the Vendôme is being built in an existing residential area, sided by the extremely busy thoroughfares of Oak Lawn and Lemmon avenues, compression of the job site itself became the No. 1 hurdle to overcome. "We really didn't even have a staging area," said project superintendent Kevin McKay. "When deliveries were made, it wasn't like we could sort it out and get ourselves organized. We had to already have that lined out before any materials were delivered.
"There wasn't even a place to pour concrete from. From the property line, you went straight down all the way around. We had to make our own area just to unload reinforcing steel and concrete." Once the logistics for the site itself were figured out, the project team turned its attention to the Vendôme itself. The tower itself is actually three buildings in one, each rising over the three-level underground parking garage. "It's a very interesting conceptual design," said Jeffery Smith, AIA, principal for Dallas-based Gromatzky Dupree and Associates, the project's architect of record. "You have the tower building of high-end condominiums which has three separate pods so that there is no central connecting hallway that links them together. Instead, there are three separate elevator cores and six sets of stairs that connect them. That all sits atop a three-level parking garage and the logistics of making the structural frame work -- up in the tower and down below in the parking garage area -- was quite a challenge.
"And then on top of that, we have a swimming pool and back landscaped area that also sits on top of the parking garage. There is a parking garage lid that covers almost the entire site. The logistics of making all of these components that really don't relate to each other relate to each other is really an interesting challenge." Dostie said that the project would have been challenging enough due to the site restrictions. The design made it even more so. "The complexity of the structure itself makes for an extremely challenging project," he said. "For example, none of the columns align. In a typical building of this size, you might expect to see somewhere in the neighborhood of 24 columns. This one has 50 and none are the same shape or size. It's because of the way each of the pods is brought together. It creates a unique geometry that is very challenging."
Project architect Juan Alayo of New York City-based Alayo Architects PC believes the construction team has done an excellent job staying true to the owner's original vision. "Projects typically go through a series of different variations just to make sure the cost value is there and the correct decisions are being made," said Alayo, who travels to the site at least once every two weeks. "How the design has been managed and has maintained its integrity throughout the project is because of the collective teamwork between Gromatzky Dupree, Manhattan and the owner. The emphasis was kept on items that were very important to the owners as far as how they dealt with the end users, while cost value has been maximized with the non-visual items. I think this has been a very successful project so far."
The Vendôme was designed in reverse order from most projects of its kind. Normally, space inside a structure is adapted to the structure itself. With this project, it was the other way around. "The condominium units were designed first," Smith said. "The shape of the building, the views, all of that was paramount to the owner. Only then did the structure follow." The result was shear walls that run the entire height of the tower from the parking garage to the penthouse. That presented another hurdle for construction crews: how to get from one part of the project to another. "The way the building is positioned, at kind of an angle, it was almost like building three buildings at once," McKay said. "You would have either had to go all the way down to the ground floor or all the way up to the 19th floor to get into a new area because the pods are interrupted by continuous shear walls."
Wooden bridges were constructed to get workers around the shear walls until entire floors were completed. "That just tripled the amount of supervision we needed because of the way we had to get to where the work was," McKay said.
Tricky Concrete Logistics
Pouring concrete, normally one of the most stress-free facets of any construction project, became a logistical problem for Vendôme crews. "There was no place to pour it," McKay said. "So we made two spots to pour from and poured it all with two tower cranes." Compounding the problem was the construction schedule. At the height of construction, 430 workers were onsite but since the project sits squarely in a heavily populated residential area, no work could begin before 7 a.m. and none could progress past 6 p.m. In addition, area permitting stated that Saturday work was to be held to a minimum and there would be no Sunday work allowed. However, McKay and his support staff worked out a plan to maximize their pours during the 11-hour day and even managed to accelerate their pouring schedule as the tower began to take shape.
"When we poured a slab, we always poured the columns back on top of it," McKay said. "Even starting as late as we did in the day -- because 7 a.m. is a late start for pouring concrete -- we did all that in the course of our 11-hour day. Most low rise buildings start the pour about 2 o'clock in the morning and you have plenty of time during the rest of the day. Here, we didn't have that extra time. Usually, all of the concrete is down by the time the sun comes up. Here, we couldn't even get started until the sun was up. But we planned our concrete vertical work such that we could begin setting column rebar at 1 o'clock, set forms at 2, and then at 3 or 4, start pouring. Then we would pour at least 50 yds. of concrete in the remaining two hours of the day. That's a lot of concrete in a short amount of time and we did that all the way up (the tower). Every day we poured a slab, we poured columns back on top."
The original plan was to finish the slab and then pour columns the following day. "But once we'd finished the first floor and started the second, and saw how everything was working," McKay said, "we decided to step up the schedule. We had finished the first floor earlier than we'd thought it would take us. We poured the second, third and fourth floors at about 60 yds. per hour with one tower crane." Making those kinds of production numbers work would be normal for a regular pan deck slab, but 17 of the Vendôme's floors were 8-in. post-tensioned flat slabs, inlaid with 635 post-tension cables for added structural strength. Additionally, each floor had nearly 40 block-outs for duct work not counting eight elevators and six stairwells, from 180 to 190 separate plumbing sleeves, another 20 sleeves for electrical work and about 600 steel embeds for window systems and balcony rails.
"The concrete was truly an amazing feat when you consider what went into pouring one floor," Smith said. "All of the odd holes that had to be blocked or formed out, plus pouring over all of the post-tension cables. It's truly phenomenal." McKay said Manhattan used post-tension cables in the slabs up to the 17th floor before changing over to the usual pan deck slab on 18. The post-tension cables were brought back on 19 before switching again to pan deck on 20 and the roof. Smith explained that was done because the penthouse floors will feature two-story units. "On the penthouse floors, we wanted to have the ability to cut holes for future stairs or atrium spaces or things like that, so the future owners of those units could do whatever they wanted," he said. "There is more flexibility with pan deck in that you can cut your holes pretty much wherever you want. You can't do that with post-tension."
Still, throughout the building, Suncoast Post Tension of Houston supplied more than 720,000 linear ft., or over 135 miles, of PT cable for the project. While that cable provides stability for the structure, it's just one more headache during the concrete pouring process. "They all want to move," McKay said with a grin, "so you have to pour in the right order and in the right place. Plus, we had a lot of balconies and all of them had a hanging curb. If it had just been a flat surface out there, that would have been one thing. But we didn't have just a flat surface, so I think an average of 60 yds. an hour was remarkable." So remarkable that the pouring schedule was accelerated from one floor every eight days to one floor every six days.
"I don't think you can overstate how significant that was," Dostie said. "Typically, you would expect a PT slab of about 15,000 sq. ft. to be completed in about eight days and Kevin's crew was doing it is six. And that was with highly irregular slab shapes. Most of the floors had hundreds of embeds involved with them and then there was the coordination of the sleeves with the PT cables and none of those cables were straight. It's just remarkable what they were able to accomplish." The entire structure including the garage consists of approximately 35,000 cu. yds. of concrete.
Addition By Subtraction
Construction began in August 2000 following demolition of a pair of low rise office buildings and their underground parking garages. Nabors Demolition of Rockwall handled the demolition of the buildings and the removal of debris, although a portion of the underground garage walls was left and used as retaining walls for the Vendôme job site. No utility relocation was needed as crews drilled and poured approximately 220 piers. The deepest were drilled under each of the shear walls about 40 ft. into the limestone below the surface. Excavation for the parking garage and removal of the excavated material was subcontracted through Weir Brothers Inc. of Dallas. The garage consists of 12,000 cu. yds. on concrete and will house space for up to 326 vehicles in its 187,819 total sq. ft.
The underground facility will also house a spacious lobby, locker rooms, utility rooms and tenant storage areas. It connects to a wide corridor running the length of the property that leads to the tenant elevators as well as service and freight elevators. Also located on the first parking level is the central HVAC plant for all units. Central hot water and water softening facilities are located on the roof, which will be accentuated with slate title parapets. The Vendôme façade will consist of a three-coat stucco system, making it the largest stucco building of its size constructed in the Dallas area in over 10 years.
PROJECT TEAM:
General Contractor: Manhattan Construction Co., Dallas
Location: Dallas (Turtle Creek)
Owner: The Setai Group, New York City
Design Architect: Alayo Architects PC, New York City
Architect of Record: Gromatzky Dupree & Associates, Dallas
MEP Engineer: HLM Design, Dallas
Structural Engineer: Thornton Tomasetti Engineers, Dallas
Vendôme Condominium Tower On Schedule For July Completion
By Mark Rea
A bit of Parisian flair is coming to the Turtle Creek area of Dallas as work progresses on the Vendôme Condominium Tower. Named for the luxurious Hotel de Vendôme located near the Louvre in Paris, the $90 million Vendôme tower will feature 119 high-end condominium units on its 2.09-acre location. Manhattan Construction Co. of Dallas is the general contractor for the 20-story, 611,757-sq.-ft. project developed by The Setai Group, based in New York City. With a target completion date of July 29, the project was 70 percent complete at the beginning of February.
"Everything is definitely on schedule for the target completion," said Manhattan project manager Neil Dostie. "We've hit our target dates throughout the project from groundbreaking to topping off last November. Of course, that makes it sound like this has been an easy project so far. That's not been the case. This has been an extremely challenging project." Since the Vendôme is being built in an existing residential area, sided by the extremely busy thoroughfares of Oak Lawn and Lemmon avenues, compression of the job site itself became the No. 1 hurdle to overcome. "We really didn't even have a staging area," said project superintendent Kevin McKay. "When deliveries were made, it wasn't like we could sort it out and get ourselves organized. We had to already have that lined out before any materials were delivered.
"There wasn't even a place to pour concrete from. From the property line, you went straight down all the way around. We had to make our own area just to unload reinforcing steel and concrete." Once the logistics for the site itself were figured out, the project team turned its attention to the Vendôme itself. The tower itself is actually three buildings in one, each rising over the three-level underground parking garage. "It's a very interesting conceptual design," said Jeffery Smith, AIA, principal for Dallas-based Gromatzky Dupree and Associates, the project's architect of record. "You have the tower building of high-end condominiums which has three separate pods so that there is no central connecting hallway that links them together. Instead, there are three separate elevator cores and six sets of stairs that connect them. That all sits atop a three-level parking garage and the logistics of making the structural frame work -- up in the tower and down below in the parking garage area -- was quite a challenge.
"And then on top of that, we have a swimming pool and back landscaped area that also sits on top of the parking garage. There is a parking garage lid that covers almost the entire site. The logistics of making all of these components that really don't relate to each other relate to each other is really an interesting challenge." Dostie said that the project would have been challenging enough due to the site restrictions. The design made it even more so. "The complexity of the structure itself makes for an extremely challenging project," he said. "For example, none of the columns align. In a typical building of this size, you might expect to see somewhere in the neighborhood of 24 columns. This one has 50 and none are the same shape or size. It's because of the way each of the pods is brought together. It creates a unique geometry that is very challenging."
Project architect Juan Alayo of New York City-based Alayo Architects PC believes the construction team has done an excellent job staying true to the owner's original vision. "Projects typically go through a series of different variations just to make sure the cost value is there and the correct decisions are being made," said Alayo, who travels to the site at least once every two weeks. "How the design has been managed and has maintained its integrity throughout the project is because of the collective teamwork between Gromatzky Dupree, Manhattan and the owner. The emphasis was kept on items that were very important to the owners as far as how they dealt with the end users, while cost value has been maximized with the non-visual items. I think this has been a very successful project so far."
The Vendôme was designed in reverse order from most projects of its kind. Normally, space inside a structure is adapted to the structure itself. With this project, it was the other way around. "The condominium units were designed first," Smith said. "The shape of the building, the views, all of that was paramount to the owner. Only then did the structure follow." The result was shear walls that run the entire height of the tower from the parking garage to the penthouse. That presented another hurdle for construction crews: how to get from one part of the project to another. "The way the building is positioned, at kind of an angle, it was almost like building three buildings at once," McKay said. "You would have either had to go all the way down to the ground floor or all the way up to the 19th floor to get into a new area because the pods are interrupted by continuous shear walls."
Wooden bridges were constructed to get workers around the shear walls until entire floors were completed. "That just tripled the amount of supervision we needed because of the way we had to get to where the work was," McKay said.
Tricky Concrete Logistics
Pouring concrete, normally one of the most stress-free facets of any construction project, became a logistical problem for Vendôme crews. "There was no place to pour it," McKay said. "So we made two spots to pour from and poured it all with two tower cranes." Compounding the problem was the construction schedule. At the height of construction, 430 workers were onsite but since the project sits squarely in a heavily populated residential area, no work could begin before 7 a.m. and none could progress past 6 p.m. In addition, area permitting stated that Saturday work was to be held to a minimum and there would be no Sunday work allowed. However, McKay and his support staff worked out a plan to maximize their pours during the 11-hour day and even managed to accelerate their pouring schedule as the tower began to take shape.
"When we poured a slab, we always poured the columns back on top of it," McKay said. "Even starting as late as we did in the day -- because 7 a.m. is a late start for pouring concrete -- we did all that in the course of our 11-hour day. Most low rise buildings start the pour about 2 o'clock in the morning and you have plenty of time during the rest of the day. Here, we didn't have that extra time. Usually, all of the concrete is down by the time the sun comes up. Here, we couldn't even get started until the sun was up. But we planned our concrete vertical work such that we could begin setting column rebar at 1 o'clock, set forms at 2, and then at 3 or 4, start pouring. Then we would pour at least 50 yds. of concrete in the remaining two hours of the day. That's a lot of concrete in a short amount of time and we did that all the way up (the tower). Every day we poured a slab, we poured columns back on top."
The original plan was to finish the slab and then pour columns the following day. "But once we'd finished the first floor and started the second, and saw how everything was working," McKay said, "we decided to step up the schedule. We had finished the first floor earlier than we'd thought it would take us. We poured the second, third and fourth floors at about 60 yds. per hour with one tower crane." Making those kinds of production numbers work would be normal for a regular pan deck slab, but 17 of the Vendôme's floors were 8-in. post-tensioned flat slabs, inlaid with 635 post-tension cables for added structural strength. Additionally, each floor had nearly 40 block-outs for duct work not counting eight elevators and six stairwells, from 180 to 190 separate plumbing sleeves, another 20 sleeves for electrical work and about 600 steel embeds for window systems and balcony rails.
"The concrete was truly an amazing feat when you consider what went into pouring one floor," Smith said. "All of the odd holes that had to be blocked or formed out, plus pouring over all of the post-tension cables. It's truly phenomenal." McKay said Manhattan used post-tension cables in the slabs up to the 17th floor before changing over to the usual pan deck slab on 18. The post-tension cables were brought back on 19 before switching again to pan deck on 20 and the roof. Smith explained that was done because the penthouse floors will feature two-story units. "On the penthouse floors, we wanted to have the ability to cut holes for future stairs or atrium spaces or things like that, so the future owners of those units could do whatever they wanted," he said. "There is more flexibility with pan deck in that you can cut your holes pretty much wherever you want. You can't do that with post-tension."
Still, throughout the building, Suncoast Post Tension of Houston supplied more than 720,000 linear ft., or over 135 miles, of PT cable for the project. While that cable provides stability for the structure, it's just one more headache during the concrete pouring process. "They all want to move," McKay said with a grin, "so you have to pour in the right order and in the right place. Plus, we had a lot of balconies and all of them had a hanging curb. If it had just been a flat surface out there, that would have been one thing. But we didn't have just a flat surface, so I think an average of 60 yds. an hour was remarkable." So remarkable that the pouring schedule was accelerated from one floor every eight days to one floor every six days.
"I don't think you can overstate how significant that was," Dostie said. "Typically, you would expect a PT slab of about 15,000 sq. ft. to be completed in about eight days and Kevin's crew was doing it is six. And that was with highly irregular slab shapes. Most of the floors had hundreds of embeds involved with them and then there was the coordination of the sleeves with the PT cables and none of those cables were straight. It's just remarkable what they were able to accomplish." The entire structure including the garage consists of approximately 35,000 cu. yds. of concrete.
Addition By Subtraction
Construction began in August 2000 following demolition of a pair of low rise office buildings and their underground parking garages. Nabors Demolition of Rockwall handled the demolition of the buildings and the removal of debris, although a portion of the underground garage walls was left and used as retaining walls for the Vendôme job site. No utility relocation was needed as crews drilled and poured approximately 220 piers. The deepest were drilled under each of the shear walls about 40 ft. into the limestone below the surface. Excavation for the parking garage and removal of the excavated material was subcontracted through Weir Brothers Inc. of Dallas. The garage consists of 12,000 cu. yds. on concrete and will house space for up to 326 vehicles in its 187,819 total sq. ft.
The underground facility will also house a spacious lobby, locker rooms, utility rooms and tenant storage areas. It connects to a wide corridor running the length of the property that leads to the tenant elevators as well as service and freight elevators. Also located on the first parking level is the central HVAC plant for all units. Central hot water and water softening facilities are located on the roof, which will be accentuated with slate title parapets. The Vendôme façade will consist of a three-coat stucco system, making it the largest stucco building of its size constructed in the Dallas area in over 10 years.
PROJECT TEAM:
General Contractor: Manhattan Construction Co., Dallas
Location: Dallas (Turtle Creek)
Owner: The Setai Group, New York City
Design Architect: Alayo Architects PC, New York City
Architect of Record: Gromatzky Dupree & Associates, Dallas
MEP Engineer: HLM Design, Dallas
Structural Engineer: Thornton Tomasetti Engineers, Dallas