Award Winning Roseburg Public Safety Center Opens...
The Public Safety Center, designed by Pivot Architecture - Eugene, OR, was the first new building for the City of Roseburg, OR in over 35 years and it received the AIA SWO People's Choice and Colleague's Choice Award for the Public category. (Click Here to read news article)
The buildings house a 40,000 square foot mixed Police and Fire Headquarters facility and an 8,000 square foot fleet and evidence storage building. Both buildings take advantage of the sloped site to allow entries on multiple levels while maintaining convenient vehicular access.
The structural design for this facility was provided by Vikki Bourcier, S.E. and the staff of Hohbach-Lewin's Eugene, OR office. The General Contractor was Harmon Construction (Coos Bay, OR).
GoToMeeting Goes to Hohbach-Lewin...
When GoToMeeting needed to open up the floor plan of this five story steel framed office building, as they sought to expand their Santa Clara corporate headquarters, they went to Hohbach-Lewin to see if it was possible. Here at Hohbach-Lewin, we know that there is very little that our clients request us to design that is impossible from an engineering perspective - the real art of engineering comes into play though when we are able to make seemingly impossible things happen while considering not only technical challenges but also perspectives outside the engineering realm (usually not the least of those perspectives is cost!)
The new plan required the removal of an interior ground floor column to allow for an uninterrupted assembly space. Removing the bottom level of a five-story column in an existing building can create all kinds of challenges (and potential major costs and headaches) for both the structural engineer and the General Contractor (in this case, San Jose Construction). Early solutions studied included the design of two enormous sixty foot long steel transfer girders weighing 350 lbs per lineal foot. Erecting twenty tons of steel (each beam weighing in at 20,000 lbs each) into an existing building with very limited head room besides presenting significant construction challenges would have also required very costly demolition and re-routing of HVAC systems.
If the cost and pain of constructing these transfer girders weren't bad enough, when it became apparent that it would be necessary to first install temporary shoring and false work to hold up the center of the building (at a cost eclipsing the cost of the transfer girders themselves) while the column was being removed all hope seemed lost! That is until, Hohbach-Lewin engineers Doug Hohbach, S.E. and Stuart Lowe, S.E. put their heads together and devised a much more elegant solution that eliminated the need for both the false work and the transfer girders. Lowe and Hohbach designed a truss which could be built between the second and third floors before removal of the ground floor column (thus eliminating the need for temporary shoring) that could be incorporated into the third floor architectural tenant improvement floor plan. Working closely, with project architect, Reel Grobman, the trusses were devised and "worked" into the floor plan - this solution came in at a fraction of the more conventional twenty ton brute force transfer girder solutions originally proposed and studied.
Hohbach-Lewin Launches its New Pasadena Satellite Office!
In an effort to better serve our southern California based projects and clientele, Hohbach-Lewin has, as of September 7, 2010, officially opened its new Pasadena office! The effort is being managed by William "Skip" Freet, S.E. Skip brings to that task a wealth of project design experience in the healthcare, education and commercial building design sectors. Besides serving existing Hohbach-Lewin clients, the Pasadena office intends to continue to build off of Skip's existing relationships with the local southern California architectural and construction community built over his thirty plus years practicing in the greater Los Angeles area. The firm is off to a running start and is already busy providing structural engineering design and consulting services for LA based commercial and educational projects with hopefully many more assignments on the way!
The Pasadena office is located at: 131 N. El Molino Avenue, Suite 160 Pasadena, CA 91101.
For inquiries or well wishes call Skip Freet, S.E. at 626-864-4449 or Dan Lewin, S.E. at 650-617-5930.
Recent projects designed by Skip:
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