Chicago— Halvorson & Partners, along with developer Centrum Properties and Walsh Construction, recently celebrated completion of the pile foundation installation for Roosevelt Collection, a new mixed-use development in Chicago's fast-growing South Loop. Covering an 8-acre site, more than 40 miles of steel H-piles were driven 70 feet to bedrock to support the new 2.1-million-square-foot development. This is believed to be a Chicago record for length of piles used in a single commercial development.
"We worked closely with Centrum, Walsh, and multiple consultants and architects, including RTKL, Hirsch and Epstein, to get this foundation right," said James Swanson, principal of Halvorson & Partners. "Our design had to deal with the large-scale site, different building types, complex underground conditions, and an aggressive schedule."
Early building layouts changed frequently in the effort to optimize this complex, mixed-use project. Even today, with piles complete and construction underway for the low-rise portions of the project (which includes 450,000 square feet of retail space, 16 movie theatres, a health club, and 2 acres of parking topped with a streetscape plaza), the high-rise apartment tower is still in the preliminary design phase. Halvorson & Partners built flexibility into the foundation system design to accommodate both these early and future changes.