Purdue's football performance complex project taking shape

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With recent steel work on Purdue’s football performance complex, the building’s skeleton is starting to take shape.

Fans now have an idea of what the $65-million project will look like, even though only 55 percent of the heavy steel work has been completed, Purdue’s senior associate athletic director for facilities Steve Simmerman said Wednesday morning.

But there’s been significant progress already on the project, which broke ground in April.

The mass excavation has been completed, and concrete work has been ongoing since the late summer. All of what Simmerman called the “vertical concrete” — that includes the concrete foundations, the pile caps where the support columns for the building are placed, all of the vertical walls, the steel reinforced concrete walls, the elevator shafts and the retaining walls — are poured to about 95 percent. There’s one more retaining wall near the base of the Boilermaker Statue that remains.

The concrete slab on the basement floor on the lower level could begin as early as Monday — the crew still is placing electrical lines, water lines and drain lines underneath the lower level floor. But the second- and third-floor level concrete is about half-poured, Simmerman said.

But it’s the heavy steel erection that really has the project taking shape.

That started on the west end of the building and has been proceeding east, and it’s reached as far east with the column members as the east side of the existing Mollenkopf building, Simmerman said.

“It looks like about three-fourths of the way, the length of the building, but the steel there on the far east part is not detailed out yet. So there’s quite a bit of steel yet that has to go on that space,” Simmerman said. “Then they have to do the long steel members that create the roof and so on of the new strength and conditioning area or the weight room. That is just now starting.”

Simmerman said he the target for the heavy steel to be complete is the end of November.

“That gives you the entire shape of the building,” Simmerman said. “It is coming along nicely. … It is happening quickly, but quite honestly, we’ve known all along that this is sort of a fast-track building. We only ended up with about 13, 14 months of construction time. At present time, they feel like they’re still able to hit the schedule of mid-to-late August next year that will allow us to do a move in for the teams and so on before the first football game.”

Work on Mollenkopf is being done, too, as the new building moves into Purdue’s current indoor football facility.

Mason work has begun there to create passageways between the new and existing buildings. A catwalk will be added as well as a camera deck on that north end, and there’s other passageways for the new locker room, sports medicine and the sports performance facility as well. But the bulk of the work inside Mollenkopf will have to wait.

“We have made arrangements with teams and arranged our schedule inside the building such that the work that has to be done that affects the indoor playing area in some fashion will really ramp up during the month of December when football finishes up,” Simmerman said. “Of course, we’re still not mathematically out of a bowl game. So we’re hoping maybe that work will need to be delayed more. We’re looking forward to that. But, at least, we have a plan in place where when football is completed for the year, the contractors will jump in there and do some of that work.”

Once the steel work is completed at the end of November, the focus will turn inside during the winter months.

“The big effort there is enclosure and getting the outer skin on the building, getting the roof on and stabilized and then being able to work the interior of the building,” Simmerman said.

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