Hawaii Dormitory II

Schofield Dorm FY11

Wahiawa District, O’ahu, Hawaii

The new dormitory provides an attractive and functional residential environment, providing a higher quality of life and be harmonious with the existing environment.

AWARDS

DBIA National Award of Excellence
2014 Civic Buildings

Society of American Military Engineers
2014 Large Business Project of Excellence | Silver

Schofield Dorm FY11

Wahiawa District, O’ahu, Hawaii

Schofield Dorm FY11

Wahiawa District, O’ahu, Hawaii

SIZE

88,000 SF

COMPLETION

2013

CONTRACTOR

Absher Construction

DELIVERY METHOD

Design-Build

CERTIFICATIONS

LEED Silver

SERVICES

The ribbon cutting is the end of a project, and the beginning of a building’s life. The Schofield Dormitory project started with cliched goals: on time, high quality, within budget. Fast forward to the ribbon cutting and the crowd was all smiles, because the dormitory exceeded those goals and invented its own goals. For the project team the planning, hearing out of concerns, agonizing over details, the sinking feeling when encountering problems, the disagreements, and rushes to meet deadlines were all in the past. After all that work, they had accomplished something special.
The dormitory stood tall, a feat of careful design built to serve the customer for decades to come. Each of the rooms shined with warm, contemporary finishes selected to be durable and easily maintained. Each bedroom had generous windows with views out to new palms and old monkeypod trees that had been carefully protected – a few bedrooms had views of mountains to the west. Opening windows let in the trade wind breezes, but the building kept cool mechanically with an efficient air conditioning system. Some recalled how the team reconfigured the design to replace an existing central plant chiller with a chiller of increased capacity to cool both the new dormitory and a neighboring one, thus simplifying future maintenance for the customer.

Some peeked into the newly tiled bathrooms, with showers served by solar hot water. They couldn’t view the solar collectors on the roof, six stories up, designed to provide all the hot showers the residents could possibly want. Also hidden were the reinforced concrete walls, sandwiched between permanent foam insulation formwork. This clever system of construction allowed the contractor to speedily erect a robust structural wall system along with integral continuous insulation simultaneously.
A high-quality project delivered under budget and ahead of schedule was an impressive story but didn’t quite capture the true spirit of the project. It was a team effort, where customer, designers and builder all worked together to exceed the cliched goals. To build a project that went beyond checked boxes, put smiles on people’s faces, and provided a place to call home.