Spence School Construction

Building Up NYC’s Private Schools

The Spence School is building an athletic and educational facility at 412 East 90^th Street, New York, NY, dubbed Spence 412. McLaren Engineering Group’s Construction Engineering team provided local and global erection sequencing for all steel trusses and the hollow-core floor planks. Additionally, they reviewed and addressed all field issues or questions from the client.

For this all-girls, K-12 private school in NYC, McLaren provided construction services for this project designed to be a living commitment to the athletics, arts, and ecology at Spence. The six-story addition expands their campus – their other locations include the Middle and Upper School on 91st Street and the Lower School on 93rd Street – and features a full-size gymnasium, nine squash courts, exhibition court, and outdoor education space. A student center, café, and Spence team rooms and athletic offices will share space on the third floor. And on the top floor, a multipurpose room for dance and performing arts will be adjacent to a center for ecology and interdisciplinary learning.

Erection Bracing

McLaren provided engineering input during construction to clarify and interpret the shoring. We also produced multiple erection bracing designs for:

• Planar bracing, to serve as temporary floor diaphragms
• Lateral and vertical bracing, for supporting columns and 2D frames
• Truss members
• Top chords of the trusses in temporary/unbraced conditions

The McLaren Difference: Applied Ingenuity

The drone flyover video below shows the interior trusses being installed over what will be the volleyball and basketball gymnasium. It also shows the temporary shoring McLaren designed for supporting those trusses at all panel points during erection for zero-load conditions. This was relatively complicated due the tight nature of the site and multiple levels of diaphragms that were, or in our case, were not able to provide stability until the hollow core was erected.