College of the Mainland-Fine Arts Expansion

Summarize the project's program, features, and achievements: Encore was given the opportunity to bring an expansion to the College of the Mainland's Fine Arts building. The tilt wall building created a space for students of the arts to have access to a new, renovated, and advanced theatre space. Some of the features seen on this project include the depressions created on the panels to incorporate custom lighting. These lights add a unique and creative feature to the fine arts building.

What obstacles were overcome related to the schedule, budget, program, specification, site, etc. on this project? Some of the major obstacles were building this project on an active campus and working to complete the project by a hard deadline for the campus to use the building for the spring 2023 semester. The panels for this project were all cast on casting beds since the slab would be later polished. Due to the site logistics and the building layout there was a lot of coordination required between the panel erector and Encore to make sure the panels were able to be poured and erected efficiently

Please communicate any engineering complexities or unique features of the panel design for this project. ? The main complexities were the depressions for the light features. The depressions were 2” x 2” and there was a total of 325 linear feet of these. There were various angles that had to be followed from the bottoms and sides of the panels in order for the lights to fit properly. They angles ranged from 25 degrees – 112 degrees. Our field team and engineers all worked together very closely to make these angles and depressions a success!

What is the potential for this project's impact on the community and/or environment? This addition to the campus Fine Arts building brought a new stage and was able to enlarge the shop capacity for the fine arts program all allowing an improvement in this local community’s fine arts program. The building will host a black box theater with support spacing, a photography suite, and office space.