Featured Project: The Cosmopolitan Resort Casino
Malcolm Muir, Office Manager (Whonnock)

The Cosmopolitan Resort and Casino project located in Las Vegas is a mix use building; casino, resort hotel and condominiums. The general Contractor is Perini Building Company and the steel fabrication is by Schuff Steel in Phoenix.

This is a $1.5 billion development and consists of a four level underground parking garage, a 70,000 square foot casino, over 300,000 square feet of retail, over 150,000 square feet of convention space, a theatre with 1,800 seats and two glass towers housing approximately 2,200 rooms, comprised of hotel rooms and condo units, all on an 8.5 acre site right on the Las Vegas Strip.

The design of the building is unusual in that the towers, which are of concrete construction and will consume over 350,000 cubic yards of the stuff, are built on top of a 10 storey steel structure; it is more usual to have steel structures sitting on concrete! By the way that's enough concrete to fill a football field (including the end zones) to a depth of 164 feet.

The towers rest on an 8 foot thick concrete pad, which in turn is supported by 111 concrete filled steel box columns, which rise 150 feet and are up to 3 1/2 feet square with 4 1/2 inch thick walls, sitting on base plates that range up to 3 1/2 inches thick and 6 1/2 feet square. These are held in place with 2 1/2 inch diameter anchors embedded 7 feet, in yet another 8 foot thick concrete pad.

The building broke ground in October 2005 and the first 12 months was spent excavating an enormous hole to accommodate the 60 foot below grade parking structure, and in the process removing approximately 800,000 cubic yards of dirt. To deal with the water table, which in Las Vegas is only 16 feet below ground, and to hold back the surrounding soil, 30 inch thick concrete slurry walls needed to be built 85 feet into the ground and a permanent dewatering system was installed beneath the building. This system will pump out up to 100,000 gallons of water a day for the life of the complex.

Steel erection started in April 2007 with the placing of a 50 foot tall 60,000 pound box column, which was fabricated in Japan. To mark the occasion, a traditional Japanese blessing and sake pouring ceremony accompanied this event. Ultimately there will be approximately 41,000 tons of steel erected on the job and the scheduled completion of the entire project is late 2009.

As you may expect, a project of this size and complexity has generated an enormous amount of back and forth communication due to refinement of the design and problem solving as the project progresses. Despite, or perhaps because of this, everyone we have worked with from the architect, the engineer, Perini or Schuff have been unfailingly professional and cooperative throughout.

The project, which is still ongoing, has one more sequence to be completed along with a few areas still under design review in other sequences. And the feature articulated glass wall, which fronts The Strip, has yet to be started. To date Dowco Consultants has produced over 16,500 detail and erection drawings and over 16,000 parts sheets.

The condominiums for one tower have been completely sold out, but I believe you can still pick up a nice 3,500 square foot 3 bedroom penthouse for about $5,900,000.00 U.S.