UConn Toscano Family Ice Forum

Scope and Challenges

The total arena holds 2,700 people and includes bench seating, rail seats, dedicated club level seating, lounge seating, and a standing room only deck area for students. 360 parking spaces are now available in the newly renovated I-Lot adjacent to the forum. The building is on track for LEED v4 Certified certification and will conform to Connecticut High Performance Building requirements as a State of Connecticut Threshold Building.

Coordinating MEP systems in a tight mechanical room was compounded by the slab-on-deck adjoined with precast bowl seating. The CMU block wall structure with precast stadia greatly reduced the overall size of the mechanical room as well as full height clearance to underside of floor deck above. With AHU’s on the exterior of the building, this created large runs of duct work that penetrated the building exterior wall within the mechanical room and greatly reduced the amount of clear space for routing all require utilities.

Turner and the MEP subcontractors discussed the support anchoring issue early and determined that installation of additional steel grid in the mechanical room would provide a more flexible support system that would disperse the point loading of the heavy mechanical piping, while allowing large ductwork to be routed overhead tight to the underside of the floor deck above. To tackle this challenge, the team used a combination of REVIT and Navisworks for the 3D MEP coordination process. These programs proved to be invaluable for the coordination process in the mechanical rooms and adjacent corridors.  However, our coordination process made it easy to detect clashes and  work with the subcontractors, MEP Engineer and JCJ as necessary to resolve the issues. In the end, we achieved a fully coordinated building where systems were able to be installed without conflicts and issues