Construction began in 2018 on the Legends of Blaine - a 192-unit independent senior apartment complex made up of a mix of one-, two-, and three-bedroom units. Additional amenities include a community room, fitness center, theater room, card and craft room, a landscaped outdoor seating area overlooking a pond, and heated underground parking.
Adding to the traditional scope of precast concrete products for multi-family housing projects which includes precast columns, prestressed beams and hollow core plank, Molin also designed precast concrete foundation walls which added value to this Legends of Blaine senior housing project. The Legends of Blaine was originally designed with site cast foundation walls, but project team representatives toured an existing construction site that employed the use of precast concrete foundation walls produced by Molin Concrete Products Company. The team was impressed by the quality of the product, and the overall flexibility precast concrete offered. Molin’s design build team also demonstrated how easy it is to convert the site cast system to precast without a major overhaul to the original construction documents.
Ultimately, the project team chose to utilize precast concrete for the foundation walls for the Legends of Blaine. The precast concrete was cast with a rock-face block form liner pattern using an architectural colored mix. Molin contributed 54,887 square feet of hollow core, 1,772 lineal feet of prestressed beams, 645 lineal feet of precast columns, 1,502 square feet of solid slabs, and 31, 168 square feet of architectural precast wall panels.
With a variety of available exterior finishes, speed of construction, and flexibility of design, precast concrete foundation walls continue to gain market share over traditional methods such as block, and site cast. An added bonus when using precast concrete in cold climates is that precast concrete does not require supplemental on-site heat to cure because it is produced off-site. In addition, high density impermeable precast concrete foundation walls offer a speed of construction that shortens the overall project construction time. |