Monument View Office Complex

South Arlington, Virginia

General Contractor:  Davis Construction
Architect:  Gensler
Engineer:  Girard Engineering
Contract Amount:  $7,875,000
Start Date:  October 13, 2011
Completion Date:  October 1, 2013

Challenge

The huge Monument View office complex is located in the last section of Arlington, Virginia, to be redeveloped, on a parcel located adjacent to the intersection of Interstate 395 and the George Washington Parkway. The L-shaped office building has a North Tower with five floors and a South Tower with six floors plus a penthouse containing the main mechanical room. The complex, which also includes two levels of parking, takes up four square blocks.

Shapiro & Duncan’s scope of work on this project included the plumbing and HVAC work on every floor of this core and shell base building. As one of the first contractors on the Monument View job site, Shapiro & Duncan was also responsible for the below ground work that required us to run drain tile under the building before we started working our way up the building doing the plumbing and mechanical work on each floor of the two towers. 

Our biggest challenge was the amount of coordination of trades that was required and our planning department stepped right up with our building information modeling (BIM) process. The plumbing and mechanical systems on each floor were modeled in 3-D by our planning department team and added to all of the other building component models to produce an integrated BIM model. After developing the BIM model, our planning team would look for clashes and then pass this information along to our project team on site, and coordinate corrective work layout with the other trades.  It was a lengthy process, but with outstanding coordination we were able to keep up with the general contractor’s aggressive schedule.

A special challenge related to the ground work was the need to pump out ground water coming from the adjacent Roaches Run Waterfowl Sanctuary. The deeper we would dig, the more water would come in. At one point in the project, we were pumping out 19,000 gallons of ground water per minute from the entire site.

Solution

In the core, our team did the plumbing for 12 multi-user men’s and women’s rest rooms (each with six urinals and 10 water closets) plus the drinking fountains and janitor’s closets on each floor. On the mechanical side in the core of the building, our solution included the air handlers in 12 mechanical rooms, one per floor plus another in the first-level parking lot. Those air handlers feed hot and cold air within the building.
While core and shell construction of a new office building is more straightforward compared to the renovation of a tenant-occupied building, a tremendous amount of coordination is nonetheless required to keep the project on schedule. In this big building, the need for up-front coordination was even more critical.

Result

Thanks in large part to the efforts of our BIM team, and outstanding coordination led by Shapiro & Duncan’s foreman Tommy Gleason, the Monument View project was completed by October 1, 2013 – on time and on budget. 

Shapiro & Duncan is proud to have been involved, literally, from the ground up in the construction of this new landmark overlooking Crystal City, the Pentagon and, of course, the monuments of our Nation’s Capital.