RICHMOND, Va. – The American Council of Engineering Companies of Virginia bestowed the 2017 Pinnacle Award to Dunbar Milby William Pittman & Vaughan and Schnabel Engineering at the Engineering Excellence Awards Gala. The Pinnacle Award is the highest honor given by ACEC Virginia, which recognizes projects demonstrating innovation, complexity, achievement and value to the industry.
DMWPV and Schnabel were awarded the Pinnacle for their work on Children’s Hospital of Richmond at VCU, a new $200-million, 640,000-square-foot building in downtown Richmond that is the largest, most advanced outpatient facility dedicated to children in the region and serves as a gateway to the urban VCU medical campus.
DMWPV provided structural engineering and Schnabel provided geotechnical and geostructural engineering for this project. The two firms collaborated on the design of the structural support and underpinning of the existing adjacent pavilion building, and design of the support of excavation and mat foundation for the new building. The project included demolishing the southern half of the existing Children’s Pavilion to make way for four stories of new construction below grade and 11 stories above, occupying more than two-thirds of the city block.
Excavation extended up to 35 feet below the foundations of the existing pavilion and 55 feet deep below busy Broad Street. The design accommodates potential future expansion of up to seven more floors above grade and expansion of the below-grade levels to the north, occupying the entire block. Building on the same block while the existing pavilion was open and operational throughout construction required careful planning and innovative engineering.
