SidePlate

Ft. Belvoir Community Hospital

Ft. Belvoir, VA

Client

U.S. Army Corps of Engineers

Architect

HDR, Inc.

Structural Engineer

HDR, Inc.

General Contractor

Turner-Gilbane

Fabricator

Banker Steel Company

Erector

L.R. Willson & Sons, Inc.

Description

Nine-story, 760,000 sf Hospital; Two Four-story, 180,000 sf Outpatient Buildings; and Two Three-story, 109,000 sf Buildings Totaling over 1.3 Million sf Using DoD’s UFC Low Level of Protection for Progressive Collapse.

Challenges

• To solve structurally challenging areas resulting from architecturally pleasing attributes
• To satisfy DoD’s Antiterrorism Progressive Collapse criteria for tie forces and Alternate Path (AP) for discontinuous columns

Solutions

• The main body of the hospital had two extending wings with very limited room for any lateral load resisting elements. The curvature and story height posed challenges with drift displacements, but were economically satisfied using SidePlate’s® connection stiffness
• SidePlate easily satisfied perimeter tie force requirements as well as AP requirements due to superior performance in full-scale blast and progressive collapse testing
• In addition, the wind criteria governed the design element when using SidePlate, and no increase in beam or column sizes were required