“The pedestrian bridge along with inviting walkways, lighting and landscaping, will offer a safer transportation route for our students and visitors between the Modesto A. Maidique Campus and the City of Sweetwater,” said Kenneth Jessell, FIU senior vice president for finance and administration and chief financial officer, in a statement.

The $9.3 million pedestrian bridge and other streetscape elements will link the city of Sweetwater with the northern entrance of FIU. Miami-based building and civil engineering firm MCM, in partnership with Tallahassee, Fla.-headquartered FIGG Bridge Engineers, will design and build the new pedestrian facilities.
MCM also completed an expansion of the FIU football stadium in August 2012.

As the project also involves city infrastructure, the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT), the Federal Highway Administration, the City of Sweetwater and Miami-Dade Transit were also included in approving the project team. Groundbreaking will take place this spring and the project is likely to wrap up by summer 2018.

“FDOT is pleased to be a funding partner in this project," said Gus Pego, secretary of FDOT District Six, in a statement. “We are committed to working together with FIU to improve safety and connectivity for all pedestrians and students.”


The proposed 320-foot-long bridge design features a 108-foot support tower intended to make the structure a landmark and a gateway for western Miami-Dade County. The bridge will also feature a lighting system designed by Randy Burkett Lighting Design of St. Louis that will illuminate it at night. A 30-foot-wide concrete canopy will be added, and the bridge’s generous width will allow for the comfortable passage of bikes and pedestrians as well as a space for special events and student seating. A 175-foot section of the bridge will be prefabricated adjacent to the site and moved into position in a single night so as to minimize traffic disruption.

“The MCM-FIGG team is honored and blessed to have been selected to build this iconic bridge,” said Jorge Munilla, president of MCM, in a statement. “It’s even more satisfying to serve the students and faculty of FIU again.”

Additionally, the project will include the construction of a new $37 million FIU parking garage. Smart phone users will be able to use a new smart parking software system, which will alert them to the location of available spaces in the garage and make parking more efficient, The application will also contain real-time information about transportation, including the new advanced bus system with which Miami-Dade Transit is planning to connect west Miami-Dade County with the Miami Intermodal Center at the airport, according to a statement by MCM.

An $11.4 million Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery Program grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation will fund the project. The funds will cover the construction of the bridge as well as improvements to the entrances of MMC and to the 109th Avenue area in Sweetwater across from MMC.

Click here to see a video of MCM-FIGG’s proposal.
 

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The facility’s design, created by the Miami office of Perkins + Will, incorporates new technology trends that allow for flexibility, adaptability, collaboration and executing a multidisciplinary approach, said Pat Bosch, design director at the architecture firm’s Miami office. As such, there are also several green building elements involved in the design, and the facility is currently tracking LEED Gold certification. Skanska USA, with offices in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., served as the construction manager on the project.

“The main goal of the Stempel Complex project was to house a series of programs that are at the core of Florida International University’s overarching mission: to conduct innovative research that has the power to transform communities,” Bosch said.

The 119,000-square-foot complex houses various academic and research programs that combine to form the Extreme Event Institute. The design incorporates flexible research and teaching space for research programs in the Robert Stempel College of Public Health and Social Work, Behavioral Health Research and Clinical Labs, Earth and Environment, and the International Hurricane Research Center. The institute will research and provide data to the U.S. government, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and other international meteorological agencies and institutes.

The building design itself was inspired by various elements and studies of natural events such as hurricanes, earthquakes and tsunamis. The complex is designed around an oval-shaped central courtyard, which provides daylighting to all the interior spaces and allows for flexibility and internal reconfiguration as well as promotes self-shading and enhances circulation.

The central courtyard orients itself to the quad with increased connectivity due to the raised research labs two stories above. These floors are offset slightly to provide self-shading solar protection along the south and west facades. The east exposure continues the alternating glass and precast concrete rhythm, transforming into large solar shading fins.

“With its multitude of systems and environmentally conscious design, the
Stempel Complex is a high-performing, smart building that engages metaphors of nature, gateways, innovation and discovery,” Bosch said. “It frames nature via courtyards and gateways and represents it by virtue of daylighting, transparency and fluid architectural shapes. The building also features chilled beam technology for cooling, daylighting and harvesting.”

The main challenge was creating the proper flexible environment in which several colleges would share space for the first time at Florida International University, Bosch said. However, the university’s commitment to collaboration and the vision behind the project really helped conceptualize the building.

“It was like ‘constructing’ the dreams and goals of the faculty and students who
utilize [the facility] each day,” she added.

This was not the first project that Perkins + Will completed for Florida International University. The design firm also designed the university’s school of International and Public Affairs as well as the Science Classroom Complex — both of which were designed to achieve LEED Gold certification.

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The 137,000-square-foot science classroom complex was conceived as the first phase of development of the Health Sciences district on the northeast corner of FIU’s main campus, said Pat Bosch, design director at Perkins+Will’s Miami office. It was developed to provide multidisciplinary research facilities to the Health Science district and to increase educational spaces for the School of Medicine as well as create more space for faculty offices, she added.

It will provide research and classroom space for multiple colleges — the Colleges of Arts & Sciences; Medicine, Engineering and Computing; Nursing and Health Sciences; and Public Health and Social Work — on campus. The design provides lab and research spaces, which are fully flexible for departments to expand and contract as needed to accommodate present and future research trends and needs.

“One key design element was the inclusion of flexible and adaptable wet labs as well as dry labs on each floor that would create communities of researchers within different colleges coming together,” Bosch said. “These collaborative spaces represent innovation and a culture of discovery, thus having a bundling represent how science meets art and creates a smart building utilizing high-performing strategies on all systems at its core and shell.”

One challenge that the design team faced during the process was figuring out how to create a self-shading building without adding cost and unnecessary elements, Bosch said, as well as creating an externally and internally transparent and visually connected building that would showcase research.

“Maintaining flexibility and adaptability was imperative to allow for FIU to grow their research program,” Bosch said. “Challenges were successfully dealt with by having a close partnership with our client. Their leadership and their clear directives instructed us to deliver a building that was based itself on research, energy modeling, daylighting mapping, facts and function rather that assumptions and subjectivity.”

Bosch added, “I learned that a successful design process complements the research process. Allowing for a disciplined analysis of all needs and criteria, and allowing the building to emerge as required, made for a smooth, satisfying design experience.”

The facility is currently tracking LEED Gold certification and was designed with the latest technologies available for 21st century learning and discovery— some of the key reasons it recently received the AIA award.

“The architecture represents the next generation of buildings not only at FIU but in this country’s higher education spectrum,” Bosch said. “It’s part of a subset of innovative buildings that respond to their context and their functions internally and externally.”

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