Tech Center Will Provide Mission-Ready Training to West Point Cadets

The granite facade of West Point's new Cyber & Engineering Academic Center was installed with a mix of granite veneer, natural limestone veneer, structural precast arches clad in natural limestone and aluminum curtain wall joined to create a Gothic style with multiple buttresses and aches, to match the look of structures at the more than two-century old institution. Photo courtesy of Ledlie Klosky

Tech Center Will Provide Mission-Ready Training to West Point Cadets

 

Well before the project team building the Cyber & Engineering Academic Center at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, N.Y., could begin highly technical granite veneer facade work this summer, it spent nearly a year excavating 350,000 cu yd of granite gneiss. “There was a significant amount of rock blasting and then we had to export all of it in about 38,000 truckloads,” says Gary Snee, project executive at Dobco Inc., the Wayne, N.J., general contractor for the project designed to prepare U.S. Army cadets for battlefields of the future.

Courtesy of Jacobs

The $200-million project involves joining granite veneer, natural limestone veneer, structural precast arches clad in natural limestone and aluminum curtain wall “to create a Gothic style facade with multiple buttresses and Tudor arches,” says Snee. “This complex veneer is built over a structural steel frame with concrete masonry unit backup walls and an air/vapor barrier.”

His firm is collaborating with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, New York District on the four-story, 146,000-sq-ft engineering laboratory and learning complex. Beyond rock blasting and veneer work, project scope includes new research space for the academy’s civil, mechanical, electrical and systems engineering programs as well as those in computer science, along with two levels of underground parking.