Two VIA Projects Win Washington ACEC Awards
Tacoma Amtrak Cascades Station at Freighthouse Square – Silver Award for Complexity, Washington ACEC Awards 2018
South 200th Link Extension – Silver Award, Transportation Category, Washington ACEC Awards 2018
Two VIA projects were honored at the American Council of Consulting Engineers (ACEC) Washington awards early in 2018. Tacoma Amtrak Cascades Station and South 200th Link Extension (Angle Lake Station) both took home Silver awards in the Complexity and Transportation categories, respectively. These awards are presented annually to teams demonstrating engineering excellence in a variety of categories.
The recently-opened Tacoma Amtrak Cascades Station relocated the existing Amtrak station in Tacoma to the Freighthouse Square Building, melding a new 9,875-square-foot station into a portion of the historic landmark built in 1909. The project team navigated a complex array of challenges to deliver this project under a demanding schedule. The teams’ work reconciled and balanced the requirements of the large multi-agency stakeholder group, seamlessly merging the new station systems into a century’s worth of existing infrastructure and systems, and worked within extremely confined physical space without interrupting busy daily rail operations.
The South 200th Link Extension project consists of a 1.6 mile extension to the light rail guideway, to the south of Sea-Tac Airport, and is anchored by Angle Lake Station as an interim terminus. VIA was the architectural lead on the design-build team comprised of partners PCL as lead contractor and HDR as lead engineering consultant. VIA’s role was to analyze the prescriptive elements of the station design, finding efficiencies, streamlining circulation, and providing a design concept that represented best value in the bid process.
For the subsequent design phase, VIA incorporated an ambitious sustainability program, including a rooftop photovoltaic array that will generate 2.5% of the station’s annual power needs and rainwater harvesting to serve 100% of the station’s landscape irrigation needs. Completed in September 2016, the project achieved LEED Gold certification, which is the second train station in the United States to achieve this status. The project won an ACEC Silver Award for Transportation, and will go on to compete at the ACEC National Awards in Washington DC in April.
South 200th Link Extension – Silver Award, Transportation Category, Washington ACEC Awards 2018