Mayo West Tower Project Wins Cold-Formed Steel Engineers Institute Award

Mayo West Tower, an expansion project of Mayo Clinic in Phoenix Arizona, has won an award from the Cold-Formed Steel Engineers Institute.

Honored with a second-place award in the category of Municipal/Services, Mayo West Tower is a seven-story structure (concourse plus six floors above grade) with approximately 140,000 square feet of prefinished exterior cold-formed steel non-load bearing wall panels.

Digital Building Components is the cold-formed steel fabricator and Pangolin Structural is the CFS specialty engineer for the project. DBC fabricated around 1,500 wall panels prefinished with windows preinstalled. The sizes of the panels are around 24 feet in length, 15 feet in height and 24 inches thick.

The size of the panels posed a unique challenge, spurring innovative solutions. Ultimately, the team decided to use 12-inch studs as the first layer wall and then place 6-inch J girts horizontally, which act as bracing for these long panels during shipping and hoisting. The team realized there was an issue with transitioning from a 24-inch-thick wall to a 6-inch wall for hoisting. The architect (HKS) did not want a panel joint separating them, so Digital Building Components and Pangolin Structural devised the solution of fabricating them as separate panels and connecting with welds to hold the panel in place for lifting as one single piece.

Photo courtesy of Digital Building Components