The privately held, Birmingham based Robins & Morton construction firm is on the fast track to finishing a considerably high-profile construction project as part of the ongoing Redstone Gateway development.

Along with the Corporate Office Properties Trust (COPT), Robins & Morton are in the process of finishing two build-to-suit structures that have been leased by Northrop Grumman, one of the largest defense contractors in the world. The architect for this prestigious development is Powers Brown Architecture.

The two buildings are nearly identical, mirror images that are situated perpendicularly, forming an ‘L.’

Each structure is roughly 125,000 square feet each, with a combined total of 250,000 square feet.

“The project is a two five-story building, a single campus for a single tenant, and the project now includes a 144,000 sq ft parking garage,” said Stephen Flournoy, Senior Project Manager for Robins & Morton. “It will also include a data center that will have its own dedicated utility yard for emergency power and services.”

This endeavor carries with it quite a hefty price tag, with a development cost of a cool $103 million. But it’s also noteworthy how quickly the team completed the two buildings.

RM NG Campus Rendering 2 Despite the complexity of the project, the Robins & Morton team completed the structures in just a little over six months. The endeavor began February 1, 2021; the final panel was raised August 27th.

The buildings are primarily concrete structures, built using a tilt-wall process. Also referred to as tilt-up construction, the technique features a series of concrete panels tilted up into place to form a building’s exterior wall.

To assemble the building’s exterior structure, the construction team poured, then erected, 76 concrete panels. Then, the team used a 1.9 million-pound Manitowoc MLC-650 crane, also known as “Big Red,” to safely erect 48 four story, 60-foot-tall panels, then stack the remaining 28 single story, 17-foot-tall panels. In total, the panels weighed more than 9.5 million pounds.

“We had a pretty rapid structural schedule,” said Flournoy. “The build out portion of it, obviously has taken quite a bit of time to go through the drawings and the development effort with the tenant, the owner, and the design team. And we’re at a point now where we were just released the first part of the year to start the build out and that’s roughly about a twelve-month period.”

The next step is for Robins & Morton is to complete the exterior skin and interior buildout of each building. Completion of the project is currently set for the end of 2022. However, due the finalization of designs and pricing updates, along with supply chain and manpower shortfalls, it’s more likely that completion will be in the early part of 2023.

“We’ve been partnering with COPT since 2012 to bring state-of-the-art facilities to Redstone Gateway,” said Flournoy. “Northrop Grumman’s lease only further contributes to the impressive line-up of leading aerospace and defense tenants at Redstone Gateway.”

To learn more about Robins & Morton, visit: www.robinsmorton.com.