Franklin Park Medical Center

Located on six small residential lots across the street from a hospital and an elementary school at the corner of two minor arterials, this site had extremely limited access.

The design of the building included a basement level parking garage that was 12 feet below the elevation of the street and 15 feet behind the curb. Keeping the safety of workers paramount, the Tilt-Up basement walls were cast on a sloping broom finished basement floor and erected so that no worker had to go behind the wall and risk a collapse of the excavation at the road. The walls were cast high enough so they formed the edge form of the first floor structural slab.

The basement parking garage extended 20 feet past the south edge of the building. This meant that the south Tilt-Up wall face had to bear on a beam line. The floor and beam structure was designed using post-tensioned beams running one direction with 6-inch-wide by 24-inch-deep cast-in-place concrete joists in the other direction. Lite-deck foam forms were utilized for the joists that spanned up to 44 feet. After the floor was cast, it was used as the casting area for all of the upper walls.

With 24,500 square feet of gross wall area and only 12,000 square feet of floor area, the panels had to be cast two to three high. Slab deflection during casting, brace point location and fall protection all added to the complexity of the task.

Immediately after erecting the main panels, the fourth floor deck was installed and the roof framed. Since many people were exposed to falls at the building’s perimeter, sleeves were cast into the top of the panels to receive dowels and cattle gates. The gates went up with the panels and formed the structure for fall protection systems.

A radius surrounds all punched openings and embedded thin brick add to appeal of the facility.

This project demonstrates how complexities can be mitigated by utilizing Tilt-Up.