CME.01 – Chicagoland Transit Museum
Team Members Heading link
- Guillermo Arellano
- Xavier Ayala
- Manuel Flores Martinez
- Ismael Lopez III
- Natalie Palarz
- John Stark
Project Description Heading link
The goal of the project is to complete a feasibility design of the first Chicagoland Transit Museum to preserve the history of Chicago’s world-class transportation system, including the following entities: Chicago Transit Authority, Pace, and Metra. The site location for the Chicagoland Transit Museum was identified to be the Central Carrier Annex building located at 358 W. Harrison St., Chicago, IL 60607, commonly referred to as The Sugar House. This location is ideal for the museum as it is near the heart of the Chicagoland area and near major transit services such as Union Station. In performing an on-site visit of the existing structure, the team found that its original design for office space/storage demonstrated short floor to floor heights and close column spacing. Due to the original design, repurposing of the existing structure will require major demolition in order to implement a museum with an open floor concept. To maintain the sense of sustainability, the proposed project scope was to repurpose the existing structural foundation and design a new steel superstructure for the museum that incorporates an elevated train display on the west side of the museum. In developing the architectural design, the conceptual museum floor plans were modeled in Revit in order to coordinate data inputs and produce project deliverables. These populated floor plans were then used in Ram Structural systems to design and analyze the proposed steel superstructure. To ensure practical and ethical engineering design procedures, the museum was designed utilizing industry standard guidelines including 2019 Building code and ASCE 7-16: Minimum Design Loads and Associated Criteria for Buildings and Other Structures. Design procedure consisted of determining gravity and lateral load combinations the structure may experience, optimizing structural component sizing, and verifying software analysis results with hand calculations.