Taylor Made

A Towering New Home for ASU Students Comes to Downtown

As Arizona State University’s downtown campus has come to life, there’s been a tremendous need for student housing. Conveniently located in the center of the urban campus, Taylor Place will go a long way towards filling that need.

Taylor Place will provide almost 1,300 Arizona State University students with campus homes, and Phoenix with a vital new addition to its burgeoning downtown.

Two, 12-story concrete towers at Taylor Place will provide housing for nearly 1,300 ASU students at the downtown Phoenix campus.

Photo courtesy Scott Blair

Developed, operated and owned for the first 30 years by Birmingham, Ala.-based Capstone Development, the $68.3 million, 366,500-sq-ft mixed-use student housing project is the first new residence hall for the downtown ASU campus.

Two 12-story towers comprise the project on 1.21 acres at the northeast corner of First and Taylor streets. Erected concurrently, the cast-in-place-concrete buildings are covered by low-maintenance aluminum-composite metal panels. The top floors of both buildings are glass exteriors for a penthouse look. They're topped by Arizona-inspired copper-colored cornices.

The connected street levels of both towers will include nearly 12,000 sq ft of publicly accessible retail space and an equal amount of dining space, ASU-staffed residential life offices and Capstone management offices.

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The two towers are connected by open-air steel bridges at all levels above the street. Along these, students will find laundry facilities, meeting rooms, vending areas and, on odd-numbered floors, screened porch pods, which have been wrapped in orange-colored fiberglass to help protect the areas from the sun.

The project is designed by the Phoenix office of SmithGroup, which has participated in other buildings for ASU’s new downtown Phoenix campus, including the renovation of the building at the southwest corner of Third and Fillmore streets for the College of Nursing and the Arizona Biomedical Collaborative.

The construction-manager-at-risk is the Phoenix office of Austin Commercial, with corporate headquarters in Dallas.

Designed for freshman in a two-bed-per-room format, the 744-bed south first tower is scheduled for delivery the first week of August for the fall semester. Facing Taylor Street, this tower incorporates a two-story, enclosed student lounge with skyline and South Mountain views.

Capstone will charge $3,475 per student in each of the 300-sq-ft rooms.

Scheduled to open by the fall semester 2009, the north tower will add 540 beds, accommodating sophomores and juniors in a private, one-bed-per-room program.

Kovach installed 6,700 separate aluminum composite panels to the building’s exterior. The window openings are colorfully shaded to prevent heat gain.

Photo courtesy Scott Blair

Taylor Place was developed differently from a traditional housing complex on an established campus, says Eddie Garcia, AIA, LEED AP, lead architect for SmithGroup. "This project had to become part of a broader representation of the new urban fabric that downtown Phoenix has become," and the mixed-use areas will be open to the public, he adds. "The activity of Taylor Place not only supports the university's goals but also those of the city of Phoenix - to support a sustainable downtown."

Chandler-based subcontractor Kovach installed more than 6,700 of exterior aluminum composite panels in 600 different sizes, with virtually no lay-down area - a "panel puzzle," says company president, Steve Kovach.

“Although the field of the walls looks uniform, there are 40, 10-ft by 10-ft curtain wall windows which are placed a somewhat random pattern,” he adds. “All the panels around these windows are unique, never repeating the same size.”

While not LEED registered, the building incorporates many sustainable principles. Before the project was registered for LEED, the USGBC made changes to the certification requirements, Roddy says. “The project was well into the design, so the changes could not be accommodated.”

The towers are sited on an east-west axis to maximize natural daylight. These facades have minimal openings, reducing unnecessary solar heat gain.

South façade windows have horizontal overhangs to block the summer sun. Inside, low-flow fixtures and dual-flush toilets save water in every dorm room.

The ground-level dining area opens toward a 4,000-sq-ft shade garden, with seating and a cooling water feature. Looking over this area is a private student roof terrace.

The landscaping, designed by Phoenix-based GBTwo, incorporates xeriscape practices and provides access to the new mall that is being developed along Taylor Street. Pedestrians along Taylor and First streets will be shaded by a cantilevered trellis system. A two-story shade structure covers the outdoor dining courtyard, and steel-trellis canopies shade the ground floor retail. A condensate collection system from the room air-conditioning units will help irrigate street plantings.

Suntec Concrete, based in Phoenix, provided concrete finishing, framework and reinforcing. The concrete fin capturing the window curtain wall above the Taylor entry of the first tower was poured in place around the structural rebar, says Suntec’s project manager, Matt Rogers, adding that it was a painstaking and exacting process.

Garcia says that schematic design began Jan. 2, 2007, and that crews were in the ground for fast-track construction by mid May 2007. Austin's senior project manager, Jim Lauer, adds that both towers topped out Dec. 21 - just seven months later

The permitting process with the city was intense for those on both sides of the paperwork. “Because of these extraordinary time pressures, this project could not have happened without the highest level of collaboration,” Garcia says.

“Teamwork made this project successful, working with the city, our subcontractors, Capstone and SmithGroup,” Lauer says.

Key Players

Developer: Capstone Development
Architect: SmithGroup
CM at Risk: Austin Commercial
Engineers: PK Associates; Dibble & Associates
Subcontractors: Suntec Concrete; Kovach Inc.; B&B Glass; HACI Mechanical; Spectra Electrical Services; W.J. Maloney Plumbing

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