James A Haley Veterans’ Hospital, Bed Tower Addition, Tampa, FL

A design build project with Turner Construction and Page Southerland Page, Inc. for a new bed tower adjacent to and connected with an existing VA hospital. The US Army had designated the building as a mission critical facility and as such the building was designed to blast standards.

The building is in a 150 MPH wind speed zone and had to meet Level D impact standards by Florida Building Code. These two standards in tandem created engineering, fabrication, and installation challenges which Strong Tower, as a design partner, helped facilitate. Due to the cost and time of the extensive testing required to have an extrusion system certified to meet both blast and hurricane standards, Strong Tower chose to use an existing tested system. Strong Tower worked with the Kawneer Company, using their 1630 SS IR Curtain Wall System. Viracon supplied the blast/impact resistant insulated glass units. Kawneer’s blast swing doors, and Horton Automatic sliding doors were incorporated into the design. Aluminum composite material (ACM) panels at the main entry and canopies accent the building.

The exterior shell of the building is precast concrete. For the precast to meet the load requirements, there is extensive steel reinforcement inside the precast. This required a unique anchor design to hold the windows in the openings in the precast. Embedded anchors were placed in the panels by Gate Precast. These anchors, one at each corner of the window, were slid into the verticals and set simultaneously with the pre-glazed windows from the inside. This procedure allowed Strong Tower to enclose the building rapidly. Large laser cut weldments were fabricated by Schuler Manufacturing.

Strong Tower pre-glazed the windows in the shop and bunked them for shipping. This allowed the field crew to stage the windows inside the building strategically which eliminated a lot of traveling inside the building.

The biggest challenges on the project were the design and sourcing of the blast and embedded anchors. Special high strength steel was used in the anchors, not readily available through Strong Tower’s regular suppliers.