ATLANTA, GA - Toll Brothers Apartment Living has contracted Balfour Beatty as construction manager for its mixed-use, multifamily Osprey project located in West Midtown Atlanta. Designed to maximize project density and accelerate schedule, Balfour Beatty is leveraging Prescient’s modular construction technology and off-site manufacturing platform to build the project’s entire tower structure. The Osprey will be among the first projects using the Prescient solution to go vertical in the Atlanta market.
The 325,000-square-foot Class A development will feature a 13-story Prescient tower, two five-story wood frame buildings and a seven-story, 540-car parking garage. With a total of 319 residential units, the top two floors will feature luxury penthouse units with private outdoor living areas. The Osprey will include 30,000 square feet of interior service and retail space, in addition to amenities including an exterior pool, fitness-on-demand studio, a sky lounge with a community bar, co-working space and a dog park.
“We’re honored for the opportunity to be Toll Brothers Apartment Livings’ construction partner in delivering this innovative project leveraging Prescient technology and lean construction techniques to meet their project density and scheduling goals,” said Patrick Fleming, senior project manager, Balfour Beatty. “Prefabricating the tower structure off-site for this project optimizes the front-end design and preconstruction phases, which in turn increases the speed of construction. Like Toll Brothers, we’re always seeking more innovative ways to deliver projects, which makes our work together on this project a great fit.”
Balfour Beatty evaluated multiple options to help Toll Brothers Apartment Living meet project pro forma objectives. Ultimately, the team honed in on Prescient as the best structural solution to achieve its goals versus a typical post-tensioned concrete frame or other load-bearing structural frame options. In addition to the project’s wall panels with structural columns, Prescient will also install precast balconies, stairs and infill-framing.
The Osprey project team quickly harnessed the value inherent in incorporating off-site manufacturing into the construction process. Off-site modular construction requires building panels to be designed to precise specifications and manufactured much earlier than with traditional construction, resulting in a far more efficient process in terms of both time and material resources. Leveraging the Prescient off-site solution also requires tight integration with trade partners very early in the design and preconstruction phases, which enables the project team to turn units several months faster than on typical projects.
With construction underway, the project team will begin installing the prefabricated tower structure by the end of the first quarter 2019 with overall project completion scheduled for first quarter 2020. In addition to Prescient, Balfour Beatty’s design partners on the Osprey also include Brock Hudgins Architects, S.A. Miro, M2 Structural, and Proficient Engineering.