While it seems obvious that a new Iron Workers Local training center would be built with steel, the actual reason was more practical. The project’s architect, Gensler, and the structural engineer, Nayyar & Nayyar International, chose steel because it was the best choice to meet the project's design requirements.
The 12,000-sq.-ft. facility opened in June 2024 as the new training center home for Iron Workers Local 63 in Broadview, Ill., about 12 miles west of Chicago. The building is nicknamed "Glass Box" and showcases steel to anyone who steps inside or looks through the glass exterior. Its concave shape is an architectural nod to the shape of a perfect weld bead.
The training center is primarily used for apprentice curtain wall training, including installation, pressurized testing, rigging, climbing, and crane signaling. To achieve its purpose, the facility needed to accommodate an overhead crane. All told, the building had to be no higher than 50 ft, maximize the overhead crane span, minimize lateral displacement because of the overhead crane and glass curtain wall, and minimize roof deflection for crane operation. The facility is a showpiece for the Ironworkers' craft, helps attract new apprentices, and acts as a regional training center for the International Ironworkers Union, welcoming trainees from across the U.S. and Canada.
"The ironworkers take a lot of pride in the high-precision craftwork they do," Gensler project architect Sean McGuire told Engineering News-Record. "They want to show off their craft and have the curtain wall element displayed in their training facility."
Steel offered solutions on all fronts. Steel-braced frames provided minimal lateral displacement for the glass curtain wall system, and W36 beams controlled the deflection of the overhead bridge crane, which had 1-in. hoist clearance.
The result is a single-story, 50-ft-tall building with a 52-ft-clear-span, 5-ton overhead bridge crane. The building incorporates 213 tons of structural steel, with AISC full-member Nick’s Metal Fabricating & Sons, Inc., as the fabricator. It has W36x194 roof beams, W21x44 roof beams along its curved sides, and W16x67 outriggers and crane rails, as well as W14x176 columns on the perimeter and W12x65 columns on the interior. The training center floor has a 5-ft by 5-ft grid of column footings, which accommodates temporary 35-ft-tall columns used for training.