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A phoenix has risen from the remnants of an old manufacturing plant-the new Mohegan Sun Casino in Connecticut. Working on a fast track, engineers erected the new palace within a year of getting the assignment.
In 1995, our firm, DeSimone, Chaplin & Dobryn, New York, was given an unusual assignment: to look at the feasibility of building a casino out of a plant for manufacturing nuclear reactors.
The facility, located in Uncasville, Conn., had previously been used by United Nuclear Corp. to build reactors for submarine engines, but in the post-Cold War era, many of these projects are shutting down. The casino, commissioned by Sun International, Miami, could be seen as swords beat into slot machines.
United Nuclear Corp. sold the plant to the Mohegan Indian tribe in 1994. Sun International, brought in as a consultant and partner with the Mohegan Indian tribe, was committed to a 12 month design and construction period for the 1.4 million sq ft, $250 million conversion project To meet the deadline, DeSimone, Chaplin & Dobryn had to produce a number of designs simultaneously. Three project teams worked on different aspects: the existing buildings; new structures; and the casino's vast interior work with its various themes.
THE EXISTING BUILDINGS
o meet the deadline, we wanted to incorporate as much of the old buildings' space as possible. The existing space totaled 400,000 sq ft, which we designed into the back of the casino house. The old buildings lie in an L pattern: three of them, each generally square, occupy a total space 900 ft long by 300 ft wide, and a 130,000 sq ft side structure sits adjacent to these buildings. The existing structures consist of steel joist roofs rising approximately 20 ft above their floor slabs on grade with typical spans of 40 by 30 ft. The roofs clear a space 17 ft high, perfect for the casino's back house, which can house restaurants with 1,500 seats and more than an acre of kitchens.
One of our tasks was to upgrade the existing buildings to current state seismic codes. Expansion joints separated each of the old buildings and split each structure along its length and width into quarters. With so many joints, we couldn't find stiff elements within the...