Frisco Sports New Facilities

Convention Center Gets Unconventional Twist

By Rob Patterson

The city of Frisco's Entertainment and Sports Complex is expanding with accommodations for fans of everything from hockey and baseball to soccer and shopping.

A new, 95,000-sq.-ft. convention center and 12-story, 321-room Embassy Suites hotel will book new business for the rapidly growing city of Frisco just north of Dallas.

Built within the city's Entertainment and Sports Complex alongside the Dr. Pepper/7-Up Ballpark and the Dr. Pepper StarCenter hockey arena, the additions will make the complex "more than just a one-event stop," said Scott Young, Frisco assistant city manager.

"The whole professional sports, hotel and conference center idea is a way to further develop the city," Young added.

A shopping center is located just east of the complex, and a 300,000-sq.-ft. Ikea outlet will soon be opening nearby. "People will come to the area to maybe shop, catch a game, eat in a restaurant, attend an event at the convention center or stay at the hotel," Young said. "It's a full wheel of development."

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Centered Around LEED

The $20 million convention center is constructed with a structural-steel frame on a 5-in. concrete slab and a steel-barrel roof with skylights. Its walls are concrete-masonry unit faced with Leuters limestone. A 45,000-sq.-ft. main ballroom is augmented by smaller meeting rooms on a second level on the southern side of the building.

The center is being built under a public-private partnership between the city and John Q. Hammons Industries of Springfield, Mo. The general contractor is CDI Contractors LLC of Little Rock, Ark., under a design/build contract with the city. Hammons will book and manage the city-owned center under a long-term lease agreement upon its June completion.

"We had 60 days of rain when we were coming out of the ground," said CDI project administrator Jack Wallace. Still, the construction process, which began in February of last year, has not faced any major complications, Wallace added. The building aims to qualify for silver LEED certification as part of a civic

initiative included in all requests for proposals for city buildings. The requirement created a learning curve for the developer and contractor.

"That's new to us, so there's been a lot more work and people sometimes not knowing what to do, but it's gone pretty smoothly," Wallace said.

Young said it took some strong convincing with the John Q. Hammons people to do the LEED. "And then as we moved into the program, I can't tell you how many times they said that this is one of the best things we did," he added. "It really wasn't that much of an increase in cost to them, and the paybacks are fantastic."

Hammons project architect David Horst said it's the first LEED project the company has built. "There are some really good things about LEED and a lot of good practices that we may do as a matter of course in buildings that aren't required to be LEED," he added.

He said the LEED requirement that HVAC ductwork be protected from getting wet was one advantage. The practice helps prevent mold and potential sick-air syndrome.

"Wherever we could get LEED points, we went after them," Wallace said. The LEED program includes a high-efficiency HVAC system, low-water-flow plumbing fixtures, use of recycled materials, low VOC content paints, concrete with recycled fly-ash content and rapidly renewable birch and maple for interior wood accents. It also includes recycling construction waste.

Using local materials for LEED also made sense for the budget and design. "We didn't actually go out of our way to buy local materials," Horst said. "We just found out we met a LEED credit because a lot of our materials were local anyway, such as the stone we selected.

"The master plan for the complex called for a certain amount of stone to be used. And it was our desire to do a traditional-yet-modern design approach. We liked the Leuters limestone so we used it all over the exterior."

He added that the use of recycled materials isn't as difficult as it once was because most steel is recycled and a lot of concrete contains recycled ash.

Sliding Into Home

The Hammons-owned $40 million, 322,000-sq.-ft. hotel with a central atrium has a poured-in-place concrete frame with post-tension cables. About 800,000 cu. yds. of concrete was poured on the job.

The exterior features limestone bands on the ground level and a synthetic stucco EIFS skin on the upper stories. The high-finish ground-level interior includes marble and onyx, San Mateo tile accents and granite countertops.

"EIFS is a hard material not to use," Horst said. "But it has its problems, like water and moisture issues. It's lightweight and it saves on structural costs. It's very inexpensive to use and has a lot of flexibility as far as design and color. We try to stay away from real modern and cold materials on a hotel and like the warm feeling of stucco." >>

Heavy rainfall also presented problems for the hotel after construction began in September 2003. "CDI was carrying 60 rain days on this job," Horst said. "They were allowed 16 rain days by contract. And they still opened it on their original schedule of 18 months [on April 15]."

CDI project supervisor Philip Wilcox said the hardest thing on the job to build was the elevator penthouse lid.

"It's 1 ft. thick with No. 7 rebar and two mats 6 in. on center," he added. "It has more rebar in it than concrete."

During construction, steel beams were temporarily inserted underneath the structure to shore it up.

On the entire project, CDI had to work around Frisco RoughRiders baseball and Texas Tornado hockey games.

The final element in the project is an $8 million city-owned parking garage with 684 spaces adjacent to the hotel and convention center that CDI built and Hammons will also manage. The three-level concrete with post-tension cable structure required a pour of 400,000 cu. yds. Leuters limestone was also used to face part of the exterior of the 288,000-sq.-ft. garage.