November 6, 2018

SPU transfer station wins award for innovative steel

Photo from Integrated Design Engineers [enlarge]

The Tipping and Transfer Building at 1350 N. 34th St. was completed in 2016.

The Tipping and Transfer Building at Seattle Public Utilities' North Transfer Station won a 2018 national award from the American Institute of Steel Construction.

The Seattle building won for projects costing less than $15 million.

The awards program is called Innovative Design in Engineering and Architecture with Structural Steel. All the IDEAS2 winners are at https://tinyurl.com/y8ymcfwy/.

The two-story North Transfer Station is at 1350 N. 34th St. It consists of the 67,000-square-foot tipping and transfer building, along with a 10,000-square-foot reuse/recycling building and a 2,500-square-foot administration building.

AISC said the tipping and transfer building won because of several innovative design solutions and advances in structural steel.

The building has 200-foot-long span roof trusses that allowed SPU to uphold its community agreement that the new facility would be no taller than the existing building. It also has a “floating corner.” A 50-foot cantilever truss and a 120-foot main transfer truss system support the weight of the building at the southwest corner without any supporting columns or walls.

The entire transfer station cost $108 million and was completed in 2016.

Mahlum designed the station and Lydig Construction built it. The team also included CDM Smith Inc., prime consultant and structural engineer (concrete); Integrated Design Engineers, structural engineer (steel); The Greenbusch Group, mechanical engineer; Fought & Co., structural steel fabricator; Atlas Tube, structural steel tube supplier; Steel Systems Engineering, steel detailer; and HBB Landscape Architecture.