Public Employees Retirement System Office Building and Parking Garage

Serving more than 709,000 members, the Ohio Public Employees Retirement System requires extensive staff to manage the retirement, disability, and survivor benefit programs for public employees throughout the state. As such, they needed a new facility to house their offices and provide parking for their employees downtown. The design team decided that the facility would be a 12-story office building constructed on top of seven levels of parking garage space, two stories of which were constructed below grade. Built on the property line, the project required extensive attention to detail for the foundation design. Eight-foot deep plate girders used as a transfer beam above the garage to support the tower were too heavy to lift with the tower crane. The steel erector used a crawler crane on the transfer level to set the steel. After the initial design, some of the girders were modified to support the weight of the crawler crane. The phased delivery of documents allowed the parking garage to top out before the release of the final architectural documents.