What comes to mind when someone mentions Las Vegas?
Extravagant casinos? Fancy nightclubs? World-class restaurants and shops? None of these would be surprising, considering that Las Vegas is renowned for catering to the pleasures of the millions of tourists that descend upon Sin City every year.
Contrary to its reputation as a land of excess, however, Las Vegas has become home to a large number of LEED projects in the past decade. Its water utility pioneered water management practices to conserve and reduce its total water intake from Lake Mead and more recently, the city has become a hotbed for solar activity. So it should come as no surprise that when Las Vegas began planning a new city hall, the design team focused on creating a premier sustainable development to showcase Las Vegas in a new light.
Located on Main Street between Bonneville and Clark Avenue, the seven-story building serves to anchor and build upon the urban renewal program seeking to revitalize the downtown Union Park neighborhood of Las Vegas. The steel-and-glass City Hall facility boasts a modest area of approximately 300,000 sq. ft, which includes 70 restricted underground parking spaces. The LEED Gold-rated facility houses a 500-seat council chamber, a public exhibit area and 250,000 sq. ft of governmental offices.
The primary structure is an angled, two-section seven-story tower immediately adjacent to a low-rise council chamber with a partial mezzanine, and there is one level of below grade parking under the entire plaza level. The plaza level floor framing, the perimeter basement walls and the supporting columns are constructed with cast-in-place reinforced concrete, but structural steel was selected for everything above grade to accommodate the architectural design intent, column grid irregularities, long spans and speed of construction. The project used 2,900 tons of structural steel in all.
To learn more about the project, see the article “Sin City Solar” in our current May issue (available now!).