Apr 21, 2013
Back in December of 2009, Jeff Stephenson of Stephenson Engineering called our office and asked us if we could join him for a meeting with John Gillanders and Peter Kurkjian of Sweeny &Co. Architects to discuss the Queen Richmond Centre West. When they showed us the concept they had developed to suspend a new 11-story reinforced concrete building above two existing heritage structures on a lot owned by Allied Properties REIT, we were duly impressed. It wasn’t long before we were engaged to solve their engineering and constructability conundrum – how to join eight independent, 1-metre diameter, 50-mm thick, concrete filled steel pipes at one point, 30-odd feet in the air, through which over 80-Meganewtons (nearly 18-million pounds) of force had to be transmitted. Oh, and it had to look… elegant. Lucky for them, elegance and strength go hand-in-hand at CAST CONNEX, and so we were able to engineer and supply three identical cast nodes weighing nearly 35,000 lbs each to integrate seamlessly with their 70-foot tall, architecturally exposed structural steel “delta frames”.
February 2013’s issue of STRUCTURE Magazine includes this article on the project. Stay tuned for more media to be posted through the summer.
