Assembly Row

Assembly Row – Block 6 was a new construction project of 447 apartment units and 48,000 square feet of ground floor retail space in Somerville, MA. We took on a vast amount of the exterior construction scope. The walls of the twenty-story tower were built out of precast concrete panels with punched openings that we were to install over 1,500 windows into. To save time and costs, we took an innovative approach to installing the windows that would eliminate the need to use lifts and swing stages on the constricted job site. The idea was to install the windows into the precast panels before the panels left their production facility. The panels could then be lifted into place and installed as usual with the windows already in them.

Our scope included 8,940 square feet of exterior curtain wall and storefront glass and glazing throughout the first six stories of the building. We also fabricated and installed more than 73,000 square feet of aluminum composite panel cladding, which included wrapping the north, west, and south elevations of the tower. It would have been difficult to manually field measure these elevations, but we were able to save time and effort by putting our 3D laser scanner to use on the task.

Our team utilized swing staging to install the panels and an additional 470 windows on the tower. It was a major scheduling challenge because multiple trades had to share the swing stages and work against the clock as dangerous high winds would frequently cause the jobsite to shut down for safety reasons.