Project Overview
Spanning 42 acres and encompassing 100,000 ft2, the Sioux Falls Public Safety Campus is a groundbreaking facility dedicated to supporting law enforcement, fire and rescue, and emergency services personnel in South Dakota by providing hands-on learning experiences at the campus’s advanced training facilities. The campus also provides ample opportunities for collaboration among departments and with the wider community. To bring the vision of architect WSKF Inc. to reality, precast concrete producer Gage Brothers manufactured a wide variety of precast concrete components, including architectural precast concrete panels, double tees, beams, columns, and stair treads.
Safe and Environmentally Sound
Precast concrete was integral to meeting the durability, flexibility, sustainability, and safety goals of this project. A key priority was to ensure that all facilities on the campus, including the 911 call center (which also functions as a storm shelter), are capable of withstanding extreme weather conditions. The facility meets the International Code Council’s Standard for the Design and Construction of Storm Shelters (ICC 500) in large part thanks to the use of precast concrete. Users of the campus can rely on the buildings to endure and perform at a high level well into the future, ensuring that officers and firefighters continue to receive the training needed – and render their critical services – to best protect the community for generations to come.
Beyond safety and longevity, precast offered a slew of sustainability benefits to the work. The design team leveraged the thermal properties of insulated precast concrete panels to achieve the highest possible energy efficiency inside the buildings, and the design maximizes the use of natural light throughout the campus. Furthermore, because the precast concrete components were manufactured and delivered from a location less than 10 miles from the jobsite, transportation emissions were minimized, reducing the project’s carbon footprint.
A significant challenge for the project was the creation of a versatile and dynamic training environment for the Urban Search and Rescue building, which required “moveable” connections that would allow walls to collapse as part of training scenarios. Recognizing that cast-in-place concrete could not provide the necessary flexibility and adaptability to meet this need, the design team chose to use precast concrete to create moveable connections within panels so that the walls can be manipulated and collapsed without affecting the structural integrity of the building.
The City of Sioux Falls Public Safety Campus is a testament to the transformative power of innovative design and construction using precast concrete. It will provide the necessary services the local community needs for years to come while simultaneously serving as a model for similar projects throughout the United States.
Mason Nichols is a Grand Rapids, Mich.-based writer and editor who has covered the precast concrete industry since 2013. |