Academic Building at U. of Kentucky Presents Construction Challenges

The current issue of Construction Digest describes some of the challenges that architects and contractors have faced in putting up a big new research-and-classroom building in the middle of the University of Kentucky’s campus.

The five-story building, called the Biological/Pharmaceutical Complex, will be a 300,000-square-foot, $132-million facility for the College of Pharmacy. Because the construction is adjacent to the 2005 Biomedical Biological Science Research Building, drilling and blasting weren’t possible when the time came to start digging. The contractors have turned instead to a trencher (below) and “a variety of backhoes and excavators.” Steel erection is scheduled to begin in mid-March and last into September.

Minimizing vibration on the three research floors, located above two floors of classrooms and offices, is another challenge. The architects, from the Lexington, Ky., firm Ekhoff, Ochenkoski & Polk and from Ellenzweig Associates Inc., based in Cambridge, Mass., eventually decided to support the lab spaces with extra-heavy steel-frame members. For now, only one floor of labs will be finished, with the other two levels left empty to accommodate future research needs.

“Any research building is like a machine — it is complicated,” says Richard Polk, a principal in the Lexington firm. “This one more so, because not only is it a research building, it is an academic building. So you have two very different functions occurring in the same structure. On top of that, those functions from a security standpoint are extremely different. Research areas require very high security — you want to limit access and not encourage the general public to visit those spaces. But the requirements of the academic floors are exactly opposite — these floors sit at the primary entrance of the building, and they have to be open and inviting to the public.”

The new building is part of the university’s planned $2.5-billion expansion devoted to health education and research.

A Trencor T1660HDE trencher