In 2020, Las Vegas will add its newest megaresort to the north end of the Strip. As it has with many other hotel/casino complexes, Las Vegas-based MJ Dean Construction is helping bring Resorts World to life.
The 86-acre property has a 3,200-seat theater; 110,000-square-foot casino; 150,000 square feet of convention space; and 3,400 hotel rooms. Technically, though, it’s not new construction – and that presents interesting challenges when placing 450,000 cubic yards over an estimated 8 million square feet of floor area.
The original construction began in the mid-2000s and stopped in 2009. With a new owner and a new design for a much taller tower – 58 floors – a great deal of retrofit work was needed, starting with the foundations. The retrofit portion contains 200 micropiles; 1,200 yards of shotcrete; and 500,000 pieces of rebar/t-heads that were drilled and epoxied into place. The redesign required cutting and drilling 2,000 new openings in the existing decks and pouring back over 1,000 existing openings. Crews are also dealing with floors built with post-tensioned cables, requiring a tremendous amount of deck de-tensioning and re-tensioning.
The project is being erected in a six-day pour cycle and will use 165,000 cubic yards. Each floor consists of 63,500 square feet of suspended structural concrete deck. MJ Dean is using a self-climbing forming system for the building’s three elevator cores, technology that helps keep the project on schedule because the core design is built within the system. Instead of needing to be flown from floor to floor, the entire system can be jumped once the concrete cures.
Below the tower is a low-rise project that will include casino floors and swimming pools. This area is over 800,000 square feet of slab on metal deck with 18,000 cubic yards. A mixture of existing foundations and steel structures have been in place since the previous project came to an end.
Two young engineers are managing the project for MJ Dean: Loay Hanthel for the tower and Chris Roesch for the low-rise. They are bringing the newest ideas to the job: tablets for all foremen and laser scanning to ensure adherence to building information modeling (BIM) models. The project remains on schedule and within budget.