McCord Hall is now about 10 percent complete overall, with about 45 percent of the structure finished as of today.

South Wing Fourth Floor

Yesterday the crews were finishing the concrete reinforcing steel on the SRC end of the South Wing’s fourth floor, to be ready for today’s 2 a.m. pour. The large patio on the fourth floor of the South Wing is now easy to see. According to DPR’s project manager Lew Laws, “there will be a structural steel roof system that ties the two wings together and provides the cover for this patio.”

South Wing Roof-top Patio

The next step for the South Wing will be the roof – a very exciting milepost, but still a few weeks away. Laws said the roof that starts at the patio will be poured next Monday (May 7), but the southern end will take a little longer.

Laws explains: “We need the stands that are holding up the forms for the north half to do the south half of the roof. This is a different system than the floors below, so we have to pour the north half, tension the cables, move the forms out, and then reuse them on the south half. So, that roof won’t be topped out until late May.”

Meantime, crews are building the decking that will form the second floor of the North Wing, aiming for early next Tuesday for concrete.

Mount Carey comes down

The back fill around the basement walls on the North Wing was finished last week, lowering Mount Carey – the pile of dirt created from the cellar hole of the North Wing. Around the construction trailer some had been calling the dirt pile “Mount Nixon” instead – in honor of W. P. Carey’s Mike Nixon, an architect who is the W. P. Carey School’s  facilities manager and space planner and our principal point of contact for the McCord Hall project. Now that the pile is scaled back, those same wags are calling it Gillespie Butte – after Chris Gillespie, also an architect and the space planner who focusses on our existing buildings.