The Belmont Assisted Living Community of Westwood is a 263,000 square foot, 6-story above grade, with 4 levels of below grade parking, assisted living facility. The “U” shaped building that surrounds a ground floor courtyard is an all cast-in-place concrete shearwall structure.

The project’s location on the Wilshire Corridor impacted the massing and aesthetics of the building, such as a height limitation for the structure.  We were able to assist the owner to achieve their goals by utilizing a cast-in-place concrete structure with post-tensioned slabs which reduced the floor to floor heights over other comparable steel and concrete systems.  The reduced floor heights achieved the proposed number of stories while remaining below the imposed height limit constraint. 

A concrete structure also fit into the owner’s goals by providing a structure that had long term durability and maximized the use of floor space by limiting the amount of building structure to columns and shearwalls.

Designing a building on a confined site resulted in creative solutions by the architect to incorporate the programming needs of the client.  We collaborated with the Architect to incorporate the head room limitations for the trash truck access into the architectural design. Ground floor slabs slope down and up to clear overhead structure.  Creative solutions were needed to be able to generate enough clearance for the trash trucks. 

Another successful collaboration with the Architect was the use of a shearwall with a "cap beam" to improve the stiffness of shearwalls.  The cap beam is a large concrete beam above the roof level that eliminates transfer beams near the ground level that support discontinuous shearwalls. Transfer beams under discontinuous shearwalls create headroom problems as well as creating a tall floor to floor height to incorporate the beam. With the elimination of a transfer beam at the lower levels, the architect was able to avoid having to coordinate the beam into their design.