Cannon Design Blog

Tim Costello, PE, CDT, LEED AP, coauthored a January 2013 Modern Steel Construction article featuring the Onondaga Community College, Ferrante Hall Academic project.

Read the complete article here.

Located in Syracuse, New York, the new music building at OCC contributes much more to the campus than performance venues and rehearsal space. Instead of building on the preselected site, the design team suggested placing the new building across the Furnace Brook Gorge, a 60-foot-deep fissure dividing the campus previously spanned only by a bridge open to wind, rain and snow. The narrow building makes use of otherwise unusable land, ties together both sides of the campus, and makes frigid bridge crossings a thing of the past. By avoiding underground rerouting of elements such as sewer lines and electrical conduits, the building is achievable within the college’s original budget.

The building’s 200-foot span relies on three 30-foot-high trusses that, due to limited working space on both sides, were erected with the help of a support tower built in the middle of the gorge, allowing trusses to be erected in two halves and spliced in the middle. To bear the load of the two-story acoustic-walled recital hall and other programmatic elements, structural members and bolts are among the largest commercially available. Unforeseen fragmentation of rock on one side of the gorge required supplementing the foundation’s seven-foot caissons with drilled mini-piles and rock anchors.

Lisa Adams - 02 Jan 2013

• Permalink
• Share
• Comment (1)