Legal remedies

Courthouse projects demand robust, varied construction

Contractors working on courthouse projects — whether it’s the recent, 238,000-square-foot Howard County Circuit Court, the $6 million renovation of the Baltimore County Circuit Court or the planned $147 million Supreme Appellate Court in Annapolis — can rattle off the special challenges that such projects entail. There are sophisticated security systems, high-performance building systems, a large array of programming needs and, of course, stringent timelines to enable the legal system to get on with its work.

One recent project — construction of the Baltimore City Mabel Houze Hubbard District Court — embodied all of those challenges and then some.

To meet budget goals and secure a prime location, the court system opted to renovate a 1960s-era office building on North Calvert Street.

The project “almost redefined the concept of renovation,” said Vince Culotta, Project Manager at CAM Construction. “We stripped the building down to its skeleton.”

With just structural framing, concrete slabs and a roof left in place, the project team discovered the building needed even further demolition and reconstruction. The roof deck required a full replacement. The site’s water table, which lays just seven inches below the building’s slab, had caused significant deterioration to nearly 40 percent of the structural columns.

In addition to repairing and inserting new structural steel into the building, the project team had to add extensive shoring and more than 200 piles to support new elevator shafts, stair towers, large open spaces (such as courtrooms and staircases), extensive mechanical equipment, and other load that the building was not originally designed to hold. The structural steel work alone topped $9 million.

From public spaces to prison cells

The team also had to transform the space to support an array of functions from public spaces, courtrooms, bailiffs’ area and jury rooms to judges’ suites, offices, court records storage, a law library and a detention facility.

The holding cells for accused individuals meet maximum security standards.

 “They have concrete benches inside, security toilets, Folger Adams locks, security ceilings. There’s a sally port, a security guard entrance and an isolated, security elevator with a cell inside the elevator to take people to courtrooms,” said Angelo Munafo, Vice President, Real Estate Development for CAM Construction.

Advanced, integrated security systems ensure that individuals can only access certain parts of the building. Expanses of bullet-proof glass and other features were included in the design to protect judges and the building itself from attack.

To prevent a vehicle from crashing through the courthouse’s main entrance, the project included installing “ballistic-rated bollards in front of the building,” Culotta said. “If there’s a vehicle, even a pretty big vehicle, going 60 miles an hour, they can stop it in its tracks. These bollards extend six to seven feet into the ground into a foundation and there’s about 70 yards of concrete under the ground anchoring them.”

Delivering all those design elements required contractors to manage some daunting logistics.

Turning offices into courtrooms

The need for suitably large and open courtrooms required contractors to remove columns on the fourth and fifth floors, install larger beams (weighing 150 pounds a linear foot) and structural shoring down to the foundation. That effort opened up a 46-foot-wide expanse for each courtroom.

The desire for high ceilings in the former office space then plunged Ariosa & Company into a four-month redesign of the space.

“One of the most difficult parts of the project was trying to deliver 10-foot ceiling heights in the eight courtrooms,” said Drew Cheezum, Vice President, Project Management at Ariosa. “We had to redesign the entire fourth and fifth floors.”

By adding “chases on the sides of the courtrooms, we could run ductwork inside of them and flatten the ductwork so it was smaller. In some courtrooms, we wound up having ductwork go up into the joists and then drop down,” he said.

Installing all new DOAS and VRF HVAC equipment, all together totaling  560 tons of cooling, in a five-story, 170,000-square-foot building on a tight, urban site saddled Ariosa with another challenge. Crews had no access along three sides of the building and could only shut down one lane of Calvert Street between 9 am and 3 pm daily. The only other delivery option was late-night and weekend shifts.

Ariosa needed to bring in 6,000 linear feet of domestic water line, 5,000 feet of sanitary line, 2,000 feet of stormwater line, 6,000 feet of condensate piping, over 35,000 feet of refrigerant piping and dozens of pieces of HVAC equipment, some equaling the size of a small house.

To complete the rooftop installation, Ariosa choreographed an 18-hour crane operation one Saturday.

“Some of our guys started at four o’clock in the morning and didn’t leave until eight o’clock that night,” Cheezum said. “We had five DOAS units, some of them over 11,000 pounds, to go up on the roof and over 75 pieces of equipment in total. The operation involved over 12 tractor trailers and it was seamless. A tractor trailer would pull up, they would lift the equipment off the trailer and the next tractor trailer would pull in.”

BC&E member companies featured in this article: CAM Construction, Ariosa & Company