Located in Los Angeles’ historic Fashion District, the Alameda Square Parking Structure was built to provide parking for a group of 100-year-old buildings. The 10-story, 3,884 stall garage was erected with 60,000 yards of cast-in-place concrete. The design components featured conventional foundations, cast-in-place walls, reinforced concrete at the elevator bank, as well as shear walls, columns, beams, upturned spandrels, reinforced masonry interior and exterior walls at the stairs, equipment rooms and electrical rooms, and prestress/post-tensioned concrete decks. A unique aspect of the $67 million parking structure was an eight-story “living wall” with hanging planters and a landscaped ramp for picnics and events on the roof. To achieve the 14 month accelerated completion schedule, the project was constructed as essentially two separate structures with a seismic joint in the center. This allowed crews to use six sets of formwork, with three sets on the east side and three on the west. The 1.4 million square foot parking structure was then built in two separate halves concurrently. Twining provided construction inspection and material testing laboratory services. Our firm’s scope of work included periodic and continuous inspections during the construction of reinforced concrete, prestress/post-tensioned concrete, reinforced masonry, structural steel (field welding and NDT inspection), and pull-testing of epoxy dowels, anchors, and embeds.
