Construction firm Robins & Morton and Corporate Office Properties Trust (COPT) are working to complete two build-to-suit facilities that have been leased by Northrop Grumman, one of the largest defense contractors in the world, in Huntsville, Alabama.
The two buildings, located in Huntsville’s Redstone Gateway development, total 236,000 square feet and stand five stories tall. Construction began in February 2021.
The buildings are primarily concrete structures, built using a tilt-wall process. Robins & Morton poured, then erected, 76 concrete panels earlier this fall to assemble the building’s exterior structure. The team used a 1.9 million-pound Manitowoc MLC-650 crane to safely erect 48 four story, 60-foot-tall panels and then stack the remaining 28 single story, 17-foot-tall panels. In total, the panels weighed more than 9.5 million pounds.
Despite the complexity, the construction team raised the final panel on Aug. 27, 2021, completing the structure in just six months.
Now the team is working to finish the exterior skin and interior buildout of each building. The two-building campus will include a 144,000-square-foot parking garage and is scheduled to complete in the second half of 2022.
“We’ve been partnering with COPT since 2012 to bring state-of-the-art facilities to Redstone Gateway,” Robins & Morton Senior Project Manager Stephen Flournoy said. “Northrop Grumman’s lease only further contributes to the impressive line-up of leading aerospace and defense tenants at Redstone Gateway.”
Robins & Morton is serving as the general contractor and the architect is Powers Brown Architecture.
