Structural Engineering

Worcester Central School District Additions and Alterations

Project Profile

Owner

Worcester Central School District

Cost

$12,000,000

Location

Worcester, New York

In addition to providing complete Structural Engineer of Record services for this 32,000-square-foot addition, Klepper, Hahn & Hyatt’s Jim D’Aloisio facilitated an initial LEED Charrette at the start of the design phase. The purpose of the charrette was to assess the school district’s interests in various sustainable strategies, and to see if they wanted to consider LEED Certification.

Although the decision was made not to pursue LEED, the design team and the owners agreed upon the following measures:

  • Use of Insulated Concrete Forms (ICFs) for most of the exterior walls of the addition. This resulted in a building envelope with high continuous R-values, as well as good air barrier properties and thermal mass. These will reduce the energy demand of the building for its entire service life. The ICFs were as high as three stories.
  • Installation of an insulated air barrier floor system in the gable roof attic of the original 1930s building. An infrared review of the building by Klepper, Hahn & Hyatt revealed large amounts of heat loss from this area. The new attic floor also provided structurally critical bracing of unbraced and bowed open-web steel joists.
  • Pervious concrete pavement for select portions of the parking lot and driveway, which served to reduce the runoff to the local storm drainage system.

The project was broken into two phases, which allowed the school to continue functioning efficiently during the work. KHH used Revit Structural software to produce the contract drawings.

Structural
Engineering

Landscape
Architecture

Building
Envelope Systems

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