General contractor McCarthy Building Cos. turned to new technology tools to help with the delivery of the St. Louis Aquarium, a $45-million, 120,000-sq-ft, two-story facility located inside St. Louis Union Station.

最初建于1894年,联合车站之一only 2,500 buildings in the U.S. recognized as a National Historic Landmark. The famous 1948 picture of President Harry S. Truman holding the false “Dewey Defeats Truman” Chicago Daily Tribune newspaper was taken at Union Station, where Missouri native Truman was returning from Washington, D.C.

In 1985, Union Station was renovated as a mall, hotel and food court. Owner Lodging Hospitality Management’s $187-million upgrade, of which the aquarium is just one part, is the most extensive renovation since that time, and will add a soda fountain, restaurants and a ropes course in the former shopping mall space, plus a renovated hotel. With only 120,000 sq ft to work with, architect PGAV Destinations had to design the aquarium with economy of space in mind.

“Between what the existing structure was and our limitations with historical review, there was kind of an east side and a west side that were two different sides of the mall, with the hallway dividing between,” says Andrew Schumacher, architectural designer at PGAV. “So we figured from there, how can we incorporate that into the story of our aquarium? We decided that one side would be all about rivers, with a focus on the Mississippi River, and the other side would be about the ocean.”

PGAV为佐治亚水族馆和海洋世界公园与娱乐公司等客户设计了景点。In lieu of creating a grand scale to wow visitors as at those destinations, the design team decided the St. Louis Aquarium’s design would be a more linear experience with an assortment of tanks of different sizes, a variety of species and different ways for visitors to view the tanks from either going below them or above them—or, in the case of the shark tank, through them.

该设计需要与麦卡锡（McCarthy）在机械系统上进行新鲜和盐水罐的机械系统以及访客的必要安全措施。有超过三英里的管道系统为水族馆计划的各种水箱的生命支持系统提供服务，1,552平方英尺的永久丙烯酸板可供观看，还有1,145立方米的水泥混凝土（4,000至5,000 psi Cycrete），所有这些都需要小心在项目上安装。设计开始后，PGAV仅在1800年代就有从1800年代的某些部分制作了曲目。

麦卡锡（McCarthy）虚拟设计与建筑总监亚历克斯·贝尔科弗（Alex Belkofer）说：“我们将像原来的那样去扫描联合车站，然后在所有混凝土和水平工作都出现后，我们将在演示后进行扫描。”“在我们删除了一些专栏之后，我们可以与设计团队返回并将他们的设计意图与最终条件进行比较，我们发现了一些东西。PGAV肯定有一些差异，并不意识到事前和事后。我们在办公室里与他们进行了一些良好的工作。”

PGAV had a room with four projectors, with McCarthy’s Autodesk Navisworks model on one screen, the post-demolition point-cloud scan on another and PGAV’s Revit model on the third, Belkofer says. On the fourth was data from all three entered into Revizto, a visual collaboration platform on which McCarthy was a beta tester. Before construction began, both McCarthy and PGAV went back and forth on all the design and modeling data, massaging any changes needed due to issues such as floors being planned for the elevation of the existing hotel and not the post-demolition level. Those were all incorporated into the final Navisworks model, but once construction began, Revizto was the tool used to view all of the project’s planned and existing conditions throughout construction.

Revizto is a real-time software platform that allowed the Navisworks construction model to be viewed by anyone on site with an iPad or smartphone. It is linked to McCarthy’s project management system, Procore, so all project personnel could view the model against real conditions using Revizto’s viewer in the field on the same plane. The model shows up as an overlay on the tablet’s screen and the tablet’s camera shows the existing conditions. Field workers could flag an issue such as incorrect installation and create a Revizto “stamp,” then push it to Procore where it becomes a documented condition marked for action, whether that’s a change order, RFI or other action. Even subcontractors using their own design or shop drawing programs can share that information via Revizto with the rest of the team.

Belkofer说：“无论其他人都使用什么专有软件，它们都是连接的。”“这就是Revizto允许我们做的。”

In addition to that, McCarthy made its own concrete placement drawings so that the self-performed placements were more easily done by field personnel. The placement drawings were brought into Revizto and shared with all.

“It’s not a data silo, it’s not in a separate box, it’s all in the same environment,” Belkofer says. “We got it down to the right cubic yardage, so these drawings have really become kind of a holistic way for us to place it, so we can order the material we need and put it in right the first time.”

麦卡锡（McCarthy）凭借相当快的时间表，在该项目的120,000平方英尺上的空间很少，因此需要确保精确度，同时由于历史悠久的建筑限制，还需要处理有限的某些区域。结构的某些部分麦卡锡根本无法触摸，因为它们是历史性的。一些必须容纳管道的空间只有2英尺的通道空间。水族馆的河流部分有淡水罐，例如水獭和食人鱼等动物，以及用于海洋生物的盐水罐，因此必须有单独的生命支持系统来单独的水箱。

“A lot of what we dealt with—and this was in the model before construction—was how do you get this all consolidated?” says Bryan Meyer, McCarthy’s project director. “We did a lot of sleeving and fitting the life support systems into tight spaces.”

Meyer says McCarthy was able to coordinate construction in the tight spaces by planning ahead, using smaller equipment and having piping assemblies custom built for the space and delivered ready to install. Having all the accurate model information at everyone’s fingertips during construction also helped with placing the large acrylic pieces for the tanks once their concrete shapes had been formed. Alejandro (Cruz) Esteban, a project engineer for McCarthy, says the subcontractors he’s working with on the project loved having all their information accessible and in one platform in the field.

The St. Louis Aquarium is expected to open by December. When completed, it will feature more than 13,000 animals and 1 million gallons of water. Construction began in November 2017.

Belkofer says McCarthy’s construction technology relationship with Revizto is also moving forward.

“We’re evolving this tool with them,” he says. “We’re using it on the [$1.8-bilion Las Vegas] Raiders stadium and on some other McCarthy jobs as well.”