Saiful Bouquet is the structural engineer-of-record for the 300,000 SF base-isloated structure at the heart of the Burbank Regional Intermodal Transportation Center (RITC). The structure houses the new consolidated rental car facility for the Bob Hope Airport, a bus transit facility, and visitor parking. However, this facility is anything but a typical consolidated rental car facility. The structure is designed to act as the hub of the federal and local Emergency Response Center following a major regional earthquake. As such, it has been designed to meet extraordinarily high seismic performance goals set by the Airport authority. The base isolated structure needed to be designed to not only withstand the largest conceivable earthquake in the region, but to remain fully operational as a crucial part of the Emergency Response Center.
The project was originally designed by others as a traditional design-bid-build project, using an all-steel frame. However, the Airport authority provided the contractors an option to go design-build, modifying the structural design only (all functional, architectural and seismic performance requirements had to remain unchanged). As the design-build structural engineer for McCarthy, Saiful Bouquet found a creative way to meet all of the project criteria with a totally different structural design that saved over $9M in construction cost over the system designed by the original design engineer, while providing a more serviceable concrete structure.
The facility was designed using a post-tensioned concrete superstructure with a special moment frame supported on eighty two (82) triple pendulum bearing isolators located just below the second floor (10 feet above grade). A long span steel roof was designed to support a 1.5 MW solar array. The project was extremely fast-tracked: the entire design, including advanced non-linear time history analyses, was completed in just 4 months – including the peer review.
