Feyen Zylstra provided all of the electrical work as a Design Services partner for Bridgestone Tower — a 1,000,000 square foot, 30-story high rise in Nashville including 524,000 square feet of office space. The building features 15 kV electrical distribution, a 1500kW emergency power system, LED custom lighting, and a state-of-the-art lighting control system. The structure electrifies the downtown skyline with exterior programmable color enhanced façade lighting, and received LEED credits for the lighting control, energy efficiency, and power monitoring, among others.

Team FZ worked an extremely aggressive schedule to have the Bridgestone Tower complete in 24 months. This schedule included extensive coordination and relied heavily on the streamlined nature of our Building Information Modeling (BIM) and prefabrication capabilities. In total, we used over 16,000 prefabrication hours on this project to produce a high quantity of electrical assemblies; every week for six months straight, we sent a truck to Nashville packed with 26 skids from our West Michigan off-site electrical prefabrication facility.

During the preconstruction process, we identified an opportunity to prefabricate all of the in-slab conduit per floor. We utilized Bluebeam to construct the layout and BIM coordination to ensure zero collisions with other trades. Using the layouts, our Virtual Design and Construction (VDC) team developed an exact plan on how to complete the orders. From there, we used 125 prefabrication hours for 778 total assemblies, 14,000 feet of PVC-coated MC cables, plus ENT.

After shipment to the jobsite, installation of the in-slab conduit took just six hours using four electricians — a process that would normally require eight electricians two days to complete. Our VDC team successfully identified potential issues and opportunities for prefabrication where we could further expedite the project schedule.