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Ralph L. Carr - Colorado Judicial Center

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Location
Colorado, USA
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PROJECT TYPE
Public / Government
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PROJECT TIMELINE
24 months
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PROJECT SIZE
12 Story - 695,000 sq. ft.
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CONCRETE
45,000cy
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ARCHITECT
Fentress Architects
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STRUCTURAL ENGINEER
Martin & Martin
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GENERAL CONTRACTOR
Mortenson Construction
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CONCRETE
Mortenson Construction
The Judicial Center was built to serve as a 100-year building for the Colorado State Court system. Its design and construction honour the legacy of the state court system while providing a facility that can accommodate the Court's future.
The project includes a courthouse with two courtrooms for the Court of Appeals, a courtroom for the Colorado Supreme Court, the Colorado Supreme Court Library, and an educational civics learning centre that features interactive exhibits showcasing the role of the American justice system. The project also includes a 12-story office tower home to the state's judicial and legal agencies.
thumb ralph l carr colorado judicial center about 1

Project Challenges

This project is built in the middle of downtown Denver activity. Located directly across from the Capitol Building and the Denver Library, constant vehicle traffic and foot traffic were safety concerns. This project had three caisson drill teams going simultaneously, and the foundation walls were placed with shotcrete.
A government building dealing with the criminal nature, this project was designed with increased security measures, such as bomb-proofing the court building. This concrete required high compressive strength and high slump mix that pushed the boundaries of mass concrete because the slabs and beams were four feet thick in places.

Project Solutions

The Ralph L. Carr – CJC project was a high-profile construction project for the Colorado Judicial Branch. There were many observers at the site, and safety was vital to the construction project's success. With pedestrian foot traffic and downtown traffic, this site required Mortenson and BURNCO to devise detailed traffic patterns and safety protocol plans.
BURNCO was able to remove our mixer trucks from the site rapidly as we could wash down our trucks at our plant. The mix designs used on this project ranged from 4000 to 7000 psi, with a 5000 psi shotcrete and a high slump slab mix being the majority of the placements. Placing 25,000 sq. ft. slabs at a time with the extreme thickness of the slabs equalled many 900cy plus placements.
To keep things flowing, the contractor placed the concrete at 150cy yards per hour in the middle of the day to avoid public traffic peak times. BURNCO (formerly Bestway) was able to move trucks around the system of batch plants to give our Denver facility the appropriate truck counts to service the project.

Project Awards

The project has won numerous awards, including a national 2013 American Institute of Architects Technology in Architectural Practice award for Building Information Modeling, the U.S.'s 2013 Best Public Buildings Project award from Engineering News-Record, the 2013 Rocky Mountain ABC Excellence in Construction award as well as several other regional awards.

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