Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/78956
Nashville's Music City Center Benefits from Scanning Technology T he 1.2-million-square-foot Music City Center in Nashville, Tenn., will have plenty of design features and spaces for visitors to talk about when it's scheduled to open in February 2013: a multifunction exhibit hall covering 350,000 square feet, a 57,500- square-foot grand ballroom and 18,000-square-foot junior ballroom, and 60 meeting rooms occupying 90,000 total square feet. In addition, several sustainable features put the new convention center on track to achieve Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Silver certifi- cation from the U.S. Green Building Council, such as a 175,000-square-foot green roof designed to mimic the rolling hills of Tennessee and a 360,000-gallon collec- tion tank that will store rainwater from the roof that will be used to irrigate outdoor landscaping and flush the building's hundreds of toilets. But none of these features will be located where they should be if the project's steel contractors— including Schuff Steel Atlantic—don't install 11,000 tons of structural steel where the official building survey dictates. In addition, Schuff is primarily erecting structural steel that will form the interior backbone of the facility's most-distinctive architectural feature: a 162-foot wall at the north end of the main structure that rises out of the main roof and resembles the body of a guitar from a bird's-eye view. Preventing a Snowball Effect Viewing three computer screens showing 2-D and 3-D models of the structural steel in his office a few blocks from the Music City Center, John Fugera, Schuff project superintendent, notes that the design tolerance is one-quarter of an inch and three-eighths of an inch around glass. Failure to adhere to the tol- erances would cause an undesirable snowball effect: work from contractors installing glass, cut stone and metal panels also would be off. "It affects all of the follow-on trades, so it's crucial that everything is where it needs to be," he adds. "We drive the bus. If we're wrong, then everybody else is going to have issues down the road." In March 2011, Schuff began laying out and erecting the steel framework for the guitar wall on the building's north side. Using a total station, the contractor worked in a clockwise direction from the north side, ensuring that every quarter-inch of the steel beams was posi- tioned precisely. Chris Clay established the relative position of the GLS-1500 laser scanner (left) to magnetic targets on the red structural steel to the left, which served as the frame for a parapet wall. This area also formed the left perimeter of a point cloud formed from the scan (bottom). AUGUST 2O12 / WWW . GEOPLA CE . COM 27 DON TALEND/SCHUFF STEEL