Gardendale Tower and Garage

A large e-commerce company selected the 16-acre Nashville Yards site as the destination for its new operations center, creating 5,000 jobs in the area. Lithko Nashville’s scope includes mat foundations, pier caps, grade beams, columns, four concrete cores, slab on grade, PT pan decks, slab on metal decks, misc. crash walls and closure walls. The tower cores are 25 levels, approximately 140,000 square feet of 2’-0” thick concrete core walls. Additionally, the cores will have 4,900 cubic yards of concrete and 600 tons of rebar.

The loading dock in the parking garage will be built on an elevated slab when typically, they are built on slab on grade for ease of constructability due to all the ramped slabs and elevation changes.

The design of the garage has a ramp in its center. In a typical sequence we would pour the ramp with the higher deck down to the deck below that already been poured. We realized this plan would impact the schedule and we worked with the design team and reconfigured the sequence, to start with the structure first. The ramp would still be built concurrent but lagging by 3 levels, allowing us to accelerate the schedule and giving us an avenue to cycle the formwork.

Adjacent to the site is a railroad pipeline, requiring an extra step with coordination of the tower cranes because we must work diligently with CSX to get crane plans approved. Along with this, the structural steel is going in at the same time as our work. To avoid even more coordination with crane usage, we are utilizing Doka’s self-climbing core system.

Nashville yards has 9 projects on site, with several going on simultaneously. Our team has done a great job coordinating and sharing access with other contractors and subcontractors.