Date: June 1, 2020
Aristeo was excited to receive the Michigan Concrete Association (MCA) Michigan Award of Excellence for our work at the Ford Motor Company Vehicle Performance & Electrification Center (VPEC). This award goes to concrete projects that showcase excellence in design and construction, and recognizes the entire project team inclusive of the project owner, contractor and engineer.
The Ford VPEC project was chosen because of Aristeo’s success with overcoming a number of planning/scheduling and materials-related challenges, but also because of the complex concrete construction that Aristeo executed to the highest standards.
This project included three connected buildings, one of which contains a next-generation aerodynamic wind tunnel, a state-of-the-art rolling road system, and a traversing measurement system. The wind tunnel building was constructed via many unique concrete pours that required Aristeo’s expertise to execute successfully. This included radius, pitched and curved concrete sections, suspended decks, pitched suspended decks, cast-in-place concrete walls and two concrete box beams that suspended the 200,000-pound traversing system over 50 feet in the air. One of the walls was a 48-foot-tall wall with a 28-foot octagon box out that transitions to a 36-foot rectangle shape and included over 2,000 linear feet of cast-in-place concrete wall.
Aside from the complex concrete situations, Aristeo’s team also worked with the entire project team to overcome several unique challenges, including coordination of many project teams and their unique schedules across the jobsite, space and equipment availability, concrete availability, range of concrete mix designs and incredibly strict tolerances necessary for the wind tunnel facility.
The Aristeo project team was thrilled to accept the award at the MCA 2020 Winter Conference on February 13th. Also at the event, Aristeo hosted a breakout session where we provided an overview of the project and answered questions from an audience of more than 100 people. Special thanks to our project team, our owner and engineer partners and the other contractors on the jobsite for assisting with the executions of such a successful project.