Construction on the MFCU corporate facility started in the spring of 2009. Light gauge steel studs support the perimeter bearing walls and steel bar joists support a concrete floor system. A tremendous amount of natural light enters the building through the clerestory structure which is supported by exposed structural steel braces. The owner, contractor, and the entire design team (CTA Architects Engineers) worked closely during the design phase to assure the best possible product.

Flathead County 911 Dispatch and Emergency Coordination Center, designed by CTA Architects Engineers,  is a 12,197 square foot building with a call center, emergency operation center, offices, vestibules, corridors, mechanical equipment rooms, equipment cache, and storage. It is a one-story CMU building with a two story CMU tower in the center to house mechanical equipment.

It has conventional spread and strip concrete footings, CMU walls, pilasters, lintels, and parapets. The roof is framed with steel (bar joists, steel deck, miscellaneous steel canopies) and it has pre-cast hollowcore planks for the mezzanine floor of the mechanical tower and pre-cast hollowcore planks for the roof of the mechanical tower. The equipment room has an 18-inch deep access floor system which consists of 2-inch thick concrete planks supported on steel pipe posts at 24-inches on center each way. The access floor is used to route wiring and ducts below the usable floor and each 2-ft square panel is removable for maintenance purposes. A 15-foot diameter satellite dish is mounted on the roof (we worked with the satellite manufacturer to create a support pier for the dish). It also has a 100-ft tall steel lattice type communications tower. The tower was designed by others, but we designed the micro pile foundation to support it.

Discovery Park Lodge, designed by GGL Architecture, consists of a 3-story wood framed apartment complex over a full basement parking garage. The main floor is “framed” with a post-tensioned concrete slab to allow for the parking garage below. The wood framed structure above consisted of bearing walls, wood sheathed lateral system, I-joist floor system, and a combination of stick frame and pre-engineered wood trusses. The building will be used for low income elderly housing with options to buy or lease each unit. The building has kitchen facilities and is fully equipped for elderly services.

A new four-story building with 38,500 square feet of usable space for ski lodge activities such as ticket sales, cafeterias, classrooms, locker rooms, and a day care center. The building will be constructed into the side of a mountain, so two of the stories will be below the backside grade. The foundation is cast-in-place concrete walls. The floor levels are framed with steel beams and girders with a concrete filled metal deck. The roof has a 6:12 slope with some dormers. The roof framing is steel purlins with wood rafters and wood sheathing. The exterior walls are wood in-fill studs of the steel frame. The interior walls are light gage steel in-fill studs. The lateral force resisting elements are a combination of steel moment frames, steel braced frames, concrete shear walls, wood shear walls, and heavy timber bracing.

An assessment of the structural integrity of this 5-story access platform was made by using a state-of-the-art finite element modeling software.  The structure is installed at a US Army Base in Nevada.  It is subjected to very high seismic activity and must support sensitive testing equipment.  Eclipse worked closely with our client, a US Army contractor, to assure that the platform and the adjacent structure which provided much of the support, could withstand code required load cases.