Tinkham Veale Student Center Completes Civil Engineering Services

KS Associates Inc. completed site design services for the new Tinkham Veale University Center at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) in Cleveland. The new two-story building is the focal point of campus and provides classrooms, dining areas and central meeting spaces for the more than 160 student organizations that were previously housed at various locations throughout the campus.

KS Associates’ role on the project was to design infrastructure to support the new building, including surface and underground parking, walkways, ADA-compliant sidewalks, underground utilities and storm water management facilities.

One of the greatest challenges of this project was to design a site plan within a confined, irregular-shaped space in the middle of CWRU’s campus, within Cleveland’s University Circle urban district. The new 81,000-sq-ft facility is located adjacent to existing structures and roadways that were to remain intact throughout construction. The center is tucked into a corner along East Boulevard and Bellflower Avenue, just north of the Kelvin Smith Library and southeast of the Peter B. Lewis Building, home of the Weatherhead School of Management. Locating the storm water management system was a particular challenge, which was resolved by placing it in a 20-ft-wide area along Bellflower Avenue.

The new university center is a model of environmental stewardship and was designed to meet or exceed Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standards at the Silver level. KS Associates assisted the design team in incorporating sustainable site features by developing a storm water collection system utilizing a green roof. The system absorbs rainwater — some of which is used to irrigate an aesthetic roof-top landscape — and diverts runoff through a sediment tank and sand filter chamber to remove pollutants. This feature helps to reduce the building’s cooling load, thereby reducing energy consumption.

The Tinkham Veale University Center is scheduled to open fall of 2014.

Source: KS Associates