PCI Design Award: – Harry H. Edwards Industry Advancement Award – 2015

This year’s Harry H. Edwards award winner is a shining example of how precast concrete can bring durability, performance, and efficiency to any project.

All of these benefits came together in the new Comstock graduate student housing at Stanford University, where the owners faced serious time and cost challenges. The project included replacing nine low-rise, two-story buildings that provided 79 beds, with four new buildings to accommodate more than five times as many students. The new structures also needed to include student meeting and social gathering spaces, laundry facilities, computer clusters, music practice rooms, game rooms, and other amenity spaces. The schedule was critical because it all had to be finished in time for the 2014 school year.

To meet the needs of the students in the short allotted schedule, the designers chose a precast concrete solution rather than wood, says Mark Palmer of Clark Pacific, the precast concrete producer for the project. “With the speed of erection, the general contractor was able to deliver the student housing within one school year, getting students in quicker, and allowing the university to start bringing in revenue earlier.”