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Louisiana State Museum and Sports Hall of Fame receives National AIA Award

By Craftengin · October 25, 2013

Trahan Architects received the National AIA TAP Building Information Modeling Award for the use of BIM technology in the design process in the design of the Louisiana State Museum and Sports Hall of fame. CRAFT teamed up with David Kufferman Structural Engineers and Method Design in collaboration with CASE to design and engineer the specialty structural steel framework that supports the undulating surfaces of dry cast concrete panels that weave their way through the museum.

Initial geometry of the specialty steel was woven into the main building structure using a series of scripts within grasshopper by Method Design while CASE rationalized and meshed the surfaces of the cast stone panels. CRAFT extracted the geometrical data out of grasshopper and into its analysis software using Geometry Gym, a plugin for grasshopper developed by John Mirtschin. CRAFT then created analytical models of the specialty steel as well as the building structural steel to better understand and control its behavior under a range of loading conditions.

The design of the specialty steel structure was then iteratively modified based on the analysis to reduce deflections and control load paths to minimize stresses in the connections to the cast concrete panels. Construction was completed in 2012 at a cost of $12.8 million.

Image Credit: Method Design