At the University of Wyoming (UW) in Laramie, officials aim to revitalize the campus with a $264 million student housing upgrade. The pandemic and supply chain disruptions delayed the project, and the lack of experienced subcontractors in the state has been a challenge.
Construction began in November 2022 and work has progressed smoothly, says Mike Disler, senior superintendent of Denver-based JE Dunn Construction.
Two five-level residences will replace residential towers on the southeast side of campus and bring student housing closer to Prexy’s Pasture, the park-turned-pasture at the heart of UW since its founding in 1887. This is the first project by residence for the university in over 60 years.
The project will have 922 beds in 505 rooms and suites, about half of the existing freshman housing inventory at UW. The buildings total more than 300,000 square meters: the North Hall is 183,029 square meters, including a dining room of 71,258 square meters on the main and mezzanine levels; The South Hall has an area of 123,853 square feet. The North Hall is scheduled for completion in the summer of 2025, followed by the South Hall in the fall.
The plan is for the buildings to be state-of-the-art, says Sam Farstad, senior project manager for UW Planning and Construction. “The [existing] The concrete towers were built in the 60s. We are north of 60 years later,” he adds.
The next projects will replace the remaining 1,100 beds in the towers that remain after the first demolitions. UW spokesman Chad Baldwin says the impetus for the project is primarily based on quality of life for students. “The housing we have now does not meet the expectations of the modern student,” he says. “This project aims to correct that. Part of it is age, certainly, but part of it is design.”
JE Dunn won the 2020 RFP following the firm’s management of a restoration project for the Wyoming State Capitol project in Cheyenne. The architect, alm2s, partnered with Plan One of Cheyenne, Wyo., and Mackey Mitchell Architects of St. Louis in design.
Scheduled for completion in mid-2025, North Hall has two distinct structures: the dining hall and the residential component.
Image courtesy of alm2s
Development of housing for students
The two new residence halls are the first phase of a larger plan at UW. “The idea is that we’re going to replace 2,000 beds, a single replacement of the existing concrete towers, which means we have to get [the new buildings] in place before we can remove the old towers,” says Farstad.
High-quality student housing has become a major factor in the competition for students, says Brad Massey, director of alm2s. Poor student housing can hinder student recruitment and academic performance, and many universities have embarked on residential upgrades as a result. “An arms race is what I would call it,” he adds.
Massey says the project includes “space outside the bedroom, high-quality study spaces and social spaces” in the new halls, along with bathroom facilities. Gone are the days of having communal bathrooms for men and women. Today, “they’re grouped into groups of five or six individual bathrooms where you can walk in, close the door behind you, and you’ve got your facilities, a toilet and a shower,” Massey says.
The project involved the integration of concrete slabs, structural steel and prefabricated frame.
Photo courtesy of JE Dunn Construction
Constructive complexities
Designed by Martin/Martin Consulting Engineers of Lakewood, Colorado, the structures of the two new buildings consist of concrete podiums, structural steel and precast cold-formed metalwork.
The podiums, located on the fourth and second floors of the north pavilion and on the second floor of the south pavilion, serve as a fire barrier for the upper floors, which are framed with cold-formed metal structures (structural sheet metal rolled into shapes). Between the structural steel decks, these load-bearing walls form the residential parts of the structure.
The design allows the dining room to have a different floor plan than the first level of North Hall; the same goes for the administrative offices, suites and social spaces on the first level of South Hall.
Gone are the days of having communal bathrooms for men and women.
—Brad Massey, director, alm2s
“With load-bearing structures, the walls need to be stacked, so it’s an efficient system if your design is the same at every level as you go up,” says Derek Swanson, an associate in the Cheyenne office of Martin/Martin. “Once you get to a floor plan where you don’t want to have the same floor plan, a concrete podium slab transfers the forces to a different column arrangement that allows for flexibility in the floor plan below.”
Manufactured by FrameX in Mexico and installed by Corona, Calif.-based Standard Drywall Inc., the precast frame has accelerated the construction schedule due to the ease and repeatability of installation.
The non-combustible nature of the framing is another advantage, but there is a problem involving integration with the other materials. Marrying these different types of structure has not been without its challenges, Disler says. “Concrete structures and steel structures have their typical industry standard tolerances, where this cold-formed metal structure has a much tighter tolerance.”
Different structural material tolerances could create uneven floors if integration is left to chance, and dedicated measurement is the only cure for any discrepancies. Meticulous attention to detail can mitigate potential undulations in the floor and ensure that the load on the structure is properly balanced.
“[Integration] it can be achieved by paying more attention or taking a little more time and care to try to find and marry the two tolerances,” says Swanson.
Because of its dual function, North Hall resembles two buildings in one. “From an input and output perspective, they are two separate structures. The dining room cannot be accessed from the housing component,” explains Farstad.
Despite the site’s five-acre size, the location on an active campus has required constant cooperation and communication.
Image courtesy of JE Dunn Construction
The works were complicated by the fact that the roof of the dining room intersects with the fourth floor of the housing component of the building. “Sharing a structure wasn’t really possible between the two floors where they intersect until we got to the fourth level, and then we were able to align the floors,” says Swanson.
UW’s strict exterior design standards require the facades to consist of 160,000 square feet of sandstone with a quilted ashlar pattern.
Mechanical systems include evaporative cooling, energy recovery units, fan coils and variable speed fans, as well as occupancy sensors. Sensors are used with residential lighting and windows to turn off heating and cooling in a room when they are open.
To strengthen multimodal connectivity in the campus, there is a new transit stop near the project. The acquisition of construction materials has also taken sustainability into account; the contractor sourced as much material as possible from local vendors to reduce delivery distance, Disler says.
The project is on track for completion next year. The north building is now finished, and the south building is about a floor behind.
The roof of the dining room aligns with the floor of the fourth level of the residential tower.
Image courtesy of JE Dunn Construction
Labor, loading docks, wind
The pandemic delayed the start of construction by about two years, altering the original budget. “Of course, by that time construction costs had increased significantly [and] acquiring material was a problem,” says Massey.
Like most projects in the US, skilled labor on this project has been a challenge and Laramie’s labor market has been particularly tight in recent years. Disler says that JE Dunn is paying close attention to this and is not currently interfering with the project.
Although some trades are local, the project’s extensive masonry work required the incorporation of most masons from Illinois, where masonry subcontractor Mark 1 Restoration is based.
As finishing activities line up in the second half of 2024, there will be 400 daily workers on site and space will be limited. “For five and a half acres, it feels very tight,” says Farstad. “There’s not an extra square inch of extra stay and parking for contractors has been a challenge.”
The space crunch is largely due to the large volume of sandstone, panels and prefabricated structures involved in the project, ongoing infrastructure projects near the site and a location on a busy thoroughfare near the union students
Off-campus storage and constant communication have opened up enough space to handle the influx of deliveries, and there was a lot of interdepartmental cooperation, Farstad says.
Then there’s the famous Laramie wind. The site’s tower cranes “can’t pick when there are winds north of 35 mph, and we’ve had that a lot,” Farstad says. The cranes have been shut down for 49 days in mid-June 2024 and the panels are only partially sheathed to prevent them from acting as sails.
The project is used as a demonstration model for construction management students. “We work side-by-side with some of their teachers and give them access,” says Will Peterson, JE Dunn’s project manager. “They also have an internship program through their construction management department, so we hire interns as part of the project as well.”
The two new halls will set the stage for further improvements as part of the UW’s master plan, and Peterson says JE Dunn is eager to respond to the upcoming RFPs, noting that campus projects of this size are not common .
The new halls are designed for at least 75 years of residential use, and each “should be a very resilient building for them,” Massey says.
