River Heights Medical building is a three story, 49,000 square foot medical office building intended for multiple tenants. FOCUS structural engineers avoided any expensive steel moment or brace frames by designing the entire building with wood shear walls. Accommodating both the large size of the building and the need for large, open, flexible spaces for future tenants required some teamwork and ingenuity to get the lateral force resisting system to safely and effectively function as all wood, and mostly confined to the exteriors of the building.

This two-story mixed-use building includes a restaurant, grocery store and office space. The 14,000 SF structure employs creative design elements to buffer higher intensity uses along Fort Union Boulevard from adjacent existing residential uses.

FOCUS did a thorough review of the current building code to ensure having a flexible floor with a rigid masonry wall system met all necessary requirements while also value engineering the structural design to meet the client’s budget.

FOCUS provided full-service surveying and engineering of 11 phases of this project. The site is over 137+ acres and includes 700 lots on a very flat site.