Balfour Beatty benefits from prefab panels on Virginia apartment project

Dive Transient:

• LCOR Inc. has awarded Balfour Beatty a $79 million deal to assemble Sage at Countrywide Landing in Arlington, Virginia. Construction has commenced on the luxury multifamily community anticipated to spark supplemental improvement and vibrancy in the Crystal City district just outdoors of Washington, D.C.
• The Balfour Beatty staff is employing the hottest systems and lean construction methodologies in constructing the condominium constructing. These will incorporate the prefabrication of exterior wall panels and mechanical, electrical and plumbing parts, as well as the use of BIM, to ensure productive supply of the venture.
• The utilization of prefabrication should really save the Balfour Beatty teams installation time. It will also supply a safer set up approach, decrease jobsite waste and free of charge up extra house for other trades on the floors in the making, in accordance to the company.

Dive Insight:

The final decision to use prefabricated exterior wall panels and MEP elements in developing the 19-tale developing was based on many elements, reported Sean Graham, vice president of operations in the Mid-Atlantic for Balfour Beatty.

“At their core, lean processes, like prefabrication, are rooted in boosting people’s functioning environments, ordeals, effectiveness, protection and time personal savings,” Graham explained to Building Dive. 

For occasion, prefabrication of the exterior wall panels minimizes the quantity of time that crews shell out on performing from swing levels and/or lifts to set up the exterior sheathing and air barrier materials. 

“Rather, the exterior sheathing and air barrier resources come pre-put in on each panel from the factory,” he explained. “The prefabrication technique not only saves our job teams time all through installation, but it also removes waste from the jobsite, offers a safer strategy to installation and saves area on the floors for surrounding trades.”

Adding continue to better time discounts and effectiveness is the actuality the panels won’t have to vacation significantly to be installed on the composition. They are domestically fabricated in Fairfax, Virginia, approximately 15 miles from the jobsite, he claimed.

Job timeline

The building’s exterior façade was developed with an aluminum composite metal panel rainscreen, Graham mentioned. Measurements are demanded to prefabricate the building’s exterior stud wall panels, providing associates of the Balfour Beatty job team an prospect to employ these regarded measurements from the stud wall panel drawings to fabricate the metal panel rainscreen cladding. That cladding is set up on the prefabricated stud wall panels.

“In addition, the repetitiveness of the project’s windows and window wall program, which the prefabricated stud wall panels are made to support, will make prefabricating the exterior partitions a charge-successful, productive, protected and responsible help wall for the project’s window techniques,” Graham reported.

Situated close to Amazon’s HQ2 venture, Sage at National Landing will be designed on the 40,000-sq.-foot site of a former Verizon telecommunications building. It is Balfour Beatty’s 2nd undertaking with LCOR adhering to the company’s current completion of LEED-Gold, 20-tale multifamily and blended-use growth The Altaire. Designed by Bethesda, Maryland, firm SK+1 Architects, Sage at Countrywide Landing is slated for completion in the very first quarter of 2023.