Therkildsen Industrial Engineering Building

Story Construction, in partnership with BNIM, was selected in 2022 by Iowa State University as the design-build team for a new industrial engineering building on campus following the successful completion together of an expansion of the Gerdin Business Building on campus in 2020. The project was made possible through a generous donation from Joyce and C.G. “Turk” Therkildsen, former Iowa State University graduates, to create a new space for the industrial engineering program.

The four-story facility along the university’s engineering corridor features an advanced manufacturing lab, a human factors and ergonomics teaching and research lab, and a data-intensive engineering analysis and visualization lab for teaching and research. Construction began at the beginning of 2023 and was completed at the end of 2024.

Successful completion of this project involved overcoming several challenges: a delivery method not frequently used by the University’s team, a program and budget developed pre-pandemic, an incredibly restrictive site in the middle of campus, and a relatively tight timeline for completion. These obstacles show the exceptional collaboration, innovative techniques, and proven processes that the team deployed to overcome these challenges and deliver a meaningful facility to the students, faculty and staff in ISU’s Department of Industrial & Manufacturing Systems Engineering.

A key component to accommodating the limited site space and the project schedule were several prefabricated building components, including exterior wall panels and a 70-foot long pipe rack. Story’s in-house virtual design and construction capabilities were a key component in delivering the project as well, providing clash detection, spacial coordination, constructibility and usability for maintenance throughout the building’s lifecycle. Early in the project, the team created 3D visualizations of the soil excavations to determine optimal foundation depths and facilitate more efficient construction of building pads and foundations, as well as an approach to temporarily support an existing fiber optic duct bank.