Las Olas Center, Fort Lauderdale Florida

This project was constructed for Wayne Huizenga as the corporate office for Huizenga Holdings and served as the kick-off project for a joint private-public venture between the City of Fort Lauderdale and Huizenga Holdings. The City had provided land and infrastructure, as well as incentives to the developer who would bring the most development to the downtown core. This highly competitive endeavor proved its long-term value to the City.

Up to this point, Fort Lauderdale, like many mid-sized Florida cities, was a cluster of mixed architecturally styled buildings awash in urban sprawl with little or no recognizable downtown. This was to change. Las Olas One, as it became known, was the first of five Las Olas projects in this area and Fort Lauderdale has never been the same.

We were involved in providing budgets and revenue scenarios as well as design direction for this project, consisting of 10 floors of Class A offices over 4 floors of mixed-retail and parking. This was one of the first structural steel buildings in this area and had its last floor added during the steel erection phase, causing the construction team to run transfer columns through the building onto a pair of large transfer beams located in the garage. If this was not enough of a challenge, the corporate helicopter was upgraded once this was completed causing another round of innovative designs and construction to allow for the increased loading of the helipad. The original Project design was for Coquina stone for all of the exterior, however we used a stamped precast for floors 4 & above and real Coquina and accents below, allowing for the look with a substantial savings in both budget and upkeep.

Sq. Ft. +/- 470,000 Cost total: $30,000,000.00 – Sold 2015 $204,000,000. Delivery: GMP/Design-build Schedule: 18 months – including interiors.

Position: Preconstruction Manager and Project Manager