Building From Here

Building From Here with Archicad

The award-winning Salt Lake City–based firm, Lloyd Architects recently played a major role in bringing new life to a property that sat dormant for decades. The buildings, dating to 1891 and located in the warehouse/railroad district of the city, were to be transformed into a 21st century destination, complete with retail offerings, activities, and recreation, as well as hospitality.

“The location tells a story of the history of Utah. Rail was a bigger part of the history 100 years ago,” explained Warren Lloyd, firm principal at Lloyd Architects. “As the community rediscovers the value of these locations, some of which were trolley repair barns or served as a space for warehousing, transforming it presented a challenge.”

Adaptive reuse projects generally involve hurdles in historic locations. Lloyd Architects embraces this type of project type and has been recognized for excellence doing so. The team at Lloyd Architects worked in Archicad to develop a design for the campus to later become home to retail shops, an indoor skatepark, a 50-room hotel, as well as a bar, and an indoor climbing facility. The renovated century-old building officially opened in June 2022.

It has received the 2022 Community Stewardship Award for Adaptive Reuse from Preservation Utah (PUT). PUT recognized the project for its representation of a major effort to revitalize what was once a busy manufacturing hub for heavy industry.

What’s Old is New Again

Lloyd Architects worked closely with several entities to bring the project to life. Relying heavily on their software of choice, Archicad, to coordinate with all stakeholders, designers, and local public historic preservation committees. Lloyd said it was a first for the area in many ways, and a first for the firm.

“It was an atypical mashup of retail, climbing gym, and outdoor retail from what previously was just warehouse space,” Lloyd remembered. “Once you add in lodging—that made it the first hotel located in this part of town. So much of this project was a groundbreaking effort to change how these spaces had been used.”

Small Team, Large Project

Lloyd Architects started using Graphisoft’s Archicad about a year before taking on the Granary Campus project. They switched from a 2D drafting environment after experience taught them that Archicad was the right platform for the Macbased office.

“We had always wanted to provide graphic representation of our drawings,” Lloyd remarked. “When we started to use Archicad we realized we could use a BIM modeling software from beginning to end, which would help us work through all the design phases, make presentations, and provide accurate construction documentation.”

BIMx, Graphisoft’s presentation tool in Archicad allowed the firm to share models with clients so they could see its evolution and be fully immersed in the design. BIMx provides 3D and 2D views, allows for cutaways of sections, and outputs animated walkthroughs of the design, which proved very helpful, given the project’s historic landmark status. Point cloud functionality and seamless interfacing in the Archicad model was a key factor as well.

“The site measured more than 100,000 square feet of existing space—with kind of expanse, there's no way to hand measure in 3D mode,” Lloyd stated. “Being able to take a 3D point cloud and import that into Archicad really is the Holy Grail. This was one of our largest completed projects to date. It required a lot of energy from the team—so you can imagine how helpful this part was.”

On the Granary project, the LiDAR point scan was by far the largest point cloud the team had worked with to date. Navigating that large of a learning curve took some effort.

The resulting scan proved hugely valuable to the project. It helped the Lloyd Architects team begin to familiarize themselves with an introductory level of organizing objects. There could be improvements, as better coordination with the scanning team in setting up the object attributes and layers according to Archicad file standards to create a template ccanresult in a “smarter” point cloud.

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Archicad software supported design choices and assisted the team with executing seismic upgrades to the building. The structural engineer working with Lloyd Architects was not working in Archicad, but team members did model structural elements that proved to be very useful during coordination. They shared the point cloud model to confirm existing structural capacity, member sizes, and configurations, which was more manageable than other options. IFC model exchange served both the structural elements and coordinating with the interior design firm on the project.

Many Teams, One Model

Coordination was no small feat, given that Lloyd Architects handled several separate contracts. “We had separate contracts with the bouldering project, one of the tenants, and then the hotel,” Lloyd recalled. “We set up the core and shell of the project, and then there were additionally three or four other independent projects. Fortunately for us, we coordinated the same core and shell model and generated separate tenant improvement packages. Each tenant had independent budgets and could choose different contractors to do the work. It required a lot of coordination, so being able to control the Archicad model was an essential piece of that.”