PROJECT OVERVIEW

Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, faced a growing student body and limited space to accommodate their everyday travel needs. The university identified an area of East Campus adjacent to the new School of Business and soon-to-come sports arena to be the site of a new parking deck for residential and commuter students that would also remain open to staff and visitors. But the site’s hillside location presented the construction team with several logistical challenges to overcome.

The East Campus Parking Garage is a nine-story precast concrete parking structure totaling 656,684 square feet that successfully met Liberty University’s demands in budget, timing, and aesthetics. The deck’s precast components seamlessly blend in with the surrounding campus, and its hyper-efficient layout lets drivers easily navigate levels to find safe parking during their time studying, working, or visiting the school.

PRECAST SOLUTION

The project’s architect, Baskervill, was tapped to design a creative solution to Liberty University’s parking problem. PCI-certified precast producer Tindall Corporation took a design assist approach to help Baskervill turn their concept into reality as smoothly as possible, given the complex landscape challenges they faced.

For the next fourteen months, Tindall engineers put great effort into collaborating with the other project teams to support pre-construction initiatives and develop a special lateral load resisting system to address the site’s tricky hill location and avoid impacting the timeline. The plan, which proved effective, was to tier slab-on-grade bays at varying elevations throughout the structure, with each level situated deeper into the hill than the one before it. To introduce unique architectural features that would align well with established buildings on East Campus, Tindall utilized two pigmented precast concrete mixes, an acid-etched finish, and thin brick accents.

The finished East Campus Parking Garage provided 2,100 new parking spaces for traveling students, staff, and visitors at Liberty University. Nestled into Liberty Mountain, the garage connects to the entrance of the university’s pedestrian tunnel through a covered walkway for convenient access to the rest of the campus. This precast concrete structural parking garage is an impressive example of how creative problem-solving can help overcome a number of construction site complexities. Leading with a design assist approach and choosing a precast solution instead of a cast-in-place superstructure reduced the overall time to completion and offered the owner significant cost savings.

Architect

Baskervill

Engineer

RTB Engineering

Contractor

Construction Management Associates, Inc.

Owner

Liberty University

Precaster

Tindall Corporation

Precast Specialty Engineer

The Consulting Engineers Group, Inc.

Thin Brick Manufacturer

Summitville

Key Project Attributes

• Difficult Location: Building the garage directly into the side of Liberty Mountain surrounded by busy students, staff, and visitors required strategic logistical planning. Trucks and cranes would have difficulty entering and leaving the site, and the design team would need to find a solution for transferring lateral loads to the structure’s shear wall elements.
• Tight Schedule on an Active Campus: The site of the garage was only thirty feet away from student housing. Although two nearby dorms were temporarily closed, construction took place during the school year and workers needed to limit disruption and move quickly to complete the project so that normal activity in East Campus could resume.
• The East Campus Parking Garage was part of Liberty University’s larger effort to reduce main campus traffic to keep pedestrians safer across the 7,000-acre campus

Project/Precast Scope

• The garage is 4 bays wide and 7 bays long with 9 parking levels
• 2,100 new parking spaces
• Tindall utilized two pigmented precast concrete mixes, an acid-etched finish and thin brick accents