The new Gilbert Place building in downtown Blacksburg, Virginia is a mixed-use project developed by the Virginia Tech Foundation, a non-profit that supports Virginia Tech University and its initiatives.
The $100 million, 256,000-square-foot, six-story building serves both the campus and the community, with four floors of office space leased to the university, retail and restaurants on the ground floor, as well as a rooftop restaurant. Two floors are dedicated to the university’s Department of Computer Science and College of Engineering, which focuses on supplying talent for Amazon’s new HQ2 campus in Northern Virginia.
One thing rivals the Gilbert Place building’s multiple uses, and that’s the number of claddings used in its design. The building's envelope is created using Kingspan's KarrierPanel® with QuadCore® insulation core, which is a cost-effective universal barrier wall alternative solution to traditional multi-component wall systems.
Designed by Hanbury Architects and developed by the W.M. Jordan Company, the challenges faced by the design team included blending the new building with an existing building across the street, and making the building not feel like a six-story building. The solution included using a variety of cladding, including traditional brick, thin brick, Kingspan Designwall 2000 and Designwall 4000 insulated metal panels, single skin panels, MCM panels, concrete panels and high-pressure compact panels. The building also incorporates some Hokie Stone, a native limestone sourced from a Virginia Tech-owned quarry dating back to 1869 that is commonly used on campus buildings.
“The material palette starts to represent the interplay between the town, which is mostly brick, and the Hokie Stone gray palette, which is part of the Virginia Tech campus,” said Alec Yuzhbabenko, design principal with Hanbury.
“As we went up levels, we wanted to break up the mass so it wouldn’t feel like a six-story building, and there’s an economy to using the metal panels that we thought was quite elegant, and at the same time pretty economical,” said David Keith, chief executive officer of Hanbury.
Behind all those different facades is one constant: 95% of the Gilbert Street building’s wall system is Kingspan’s KarrierPanel® with QuadCore®, serving as the high-performing air and vapor barrier by providing continuous insulation in an all-in-one product.
KarrierPanel® utilizes Kingspan’s fully engineered KarrierRail® that facilitates the use of a wide range of facade options.
“The KarrierPanel® afforded us the opportunity to easily switch façade materials to create the distinct massing moves that helped break up the scale of the building,” said Yuzhbabenko.
In addition to facilitating the use of several different facade materials, using KarrierPanel® also helped with the overall build speed.
“I think one of the most compelling reasons we selected KarrierPanel® was not having to scaffold the entire building. The contractor quickly came on board to be able to dry-in the building and get multiple trades on the site almost simultaneously,” said Keith.
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