Professional Football Team Hires Local Contractor Midland Steel

Midland Steel was chosen to fabricate and erect ad boards in the West end zone of Arrowhead Stadium. The project involved taking down the existing steel, and then fabricating the new structure. Midland Steel began the project in June, and it was completed in early August.

Midland Steel was excited to be included in a project that would be seen by hundreds of thousands of football fans throughout the coming seasons.

The height and weight of the steel Midland used for the project included boards that weigh 21 tons and are 53 feet long, 20 feet tall and seven feet wide. The new boards sit on existing columns that are 42 feet above the upper concourse.

Midland Steel has extensive experience in a variety of sports and entertainment facilities, including the Meadowmere Amphitheater in Grandview and the football stadium at Missouri Western State University in St. Joseph, where the pros hold their training camp each summer.

Located just northwest of Kansas City in Wathena, Kansas, and Riverside Missouri, respectively, Midland Steel is ideally situated to serve the Greater Kansas City and Midwestern markets. For more than half a century, they have created loyal and satisfied customers with their high quality of work and business integrity.

As a result, when local sports teams need a steel fabricator and erector, they seek out the excellent work of Midland Steel. Here are a few of the benefits of choosing the team at Midland Steel:

• As both the fabricator and erector of your project, you’ll enjoy a seamless experience without the potential errors and delays that come with using separate companies for these two areas.
• Midland Steel is certified by the American Institute of Steel Construction (AISC), which means the company meets strict standards for quality and safety.
• When you choose Midland Steel, you are choosing a true partner in your construction project. You will see the Midland Steel team on your site, with project managers frequently checking for quality standards to be met.

If you’re planning a building project, contact Midland Steel. We look forward to hearing about the specific plans and goals you have and then discussing what Midland Steel can bring to your project.

A Construction Project That Resulted in a Vibrant Community With Incredible Amenities

While you might still smell the scent of roasted coffee at Roaster’s Block, it’s now because of the upscale coffee bar, which serves brews from Messenger Coffee Co. in Kansas City. It’s just one of the amazing amenities to come out of the construction project that transformed downtown industrial buildings into sought-after living units.

The project, located at 701 Broadway and 33 W. Eighth Street, encompasses the former Folgers building, as well as the six-story Boss Building and the eight-story Swofford Building. The stunning result of this construction project is being highlighted in Multifamily Executive Magazine as the best adaptive use project, which was recently celebrated at the Roaster’s Block during a ribbon-cutting ceremony.

Midland Steel is proud to be the steel fabricator and erector for the project, which includes not only the three buildings but also an outdoor pool area, complete with hot tub, gas grills, fire pits and outdoor television. The pool area fills the location where a coffee bean silo once stood between the former manufacturing buildings.

The repurposing of the buildings presented some unique challenges, including the removal of the silo. The close proximity of the other buildings made it impossible to use a wrecking ball, so a special 13,000-pound steel blade was designed to be repeatedly dropped on the silo to break it up.

It’s hard to imagine that such a silo once stood in a communal area that is now used for hosting Sunday brunches or Saturday night parties with an upscale feel. The Streetside on Roaster’s Block outdoor amenity area is just one of the attractive benefits that Roaster’s Block offers.

Besides the pool area and the coffee bar, the community also enjoys perks like communal gathering areas on each floor, electric car charging stations in the garage, free dog walking, free fitness classes and monthly Work from Home events, which include executive leadership seminars several times a year.

With all of these features, you’d be ready to move in without even hearing about the actual living units, but they have an attraction all their own. First-floor units feature 25-foot ceilings and some of the original pillars topped with detailed capitals. The units also have larger-than-usual floor plans for urban dwellings.

While the construction project could have been designed to fit a few more units in on each floor, the designers were more interested in offering a floor plant that would appeal not just to millennials, but also to empty nesters and baby boomers, as well as executives located in Kansas City.

If you’re planning a construction project that requires a unique approach, give Midland Steel a call. We are ready to handle the intricacies of your unique design and the specific challenges of any project.

Midland Steel Can Handle Your Unique Design

Luxury can mean a lot of different things. To some people, it’s a view of Central Park in New York City, and to others, it may mean a sprawling ranch in Texas. For a lucky few people, luxury means self-sustaining comfort in light of a natural disaster or disease outbreak. Midland Steel was the fabricator and erector on a recent project that offers both a self-sustaining community and all the perks of a luxury apartment building.

Midland Steel is now working on their second project with designer Larry Hall and MAI Design Build on delivering the exact specifications for an unusual condominium concept. The luxury condos include seven 1,800 square foot condos sold for approximately $3 million each. The building, located three hours Northwest of Kansas City in Concordia, has some unusual features that draw the pursuit of a different kind of happiness:

Underground escape: One of the ways in which the new development protects the safety of its residents is by its position. The building is built almost entirely underground in an abandoned Atlas Missile Silo, with 13 floors below ground. It is designed to weather any natural disaster or nuclear war.

Luxury perks: The condominium building features an in-house movie theater, gym, swimming pool and dog park. Even if there’s never an emergency, residents can enjoy amenities tailored to their needs that are right in the building.

Self-sustaining living: The building is equipped with some impressive technology for allowing the residents to live indefinitely without supplies from the outside. An aquaponic system provides hydroponic vegetable gardens and a tilapia tank for sustainable farming. An in-house pharmacy provides necessary medication to residents and a filtration system that provides air 10,000 times cleaner than outside air. While many communities are designed to live off the grid for a set amount of time, this building can self-sustain residents indefinitely.

For Midland Steel, the project offered some unique opportunities to get creative with its techniques:

Unusual construction requirements: The building is silo-shaped, with a frame that was fairly standard for a multi-level round project. With most of the building underground, materials could not be loaded in through the sides of the structure, like they would in a typical building project. Each item had to be lowered down through the silo door area.

The columns used in the project were a mix of W10×45, W10×60 and W10×88, while beams were constructed with W16×26, W16×31, W16×40, W14×22, W12×120, W10×12 and W8×10. The shaft walls were constructed using rolled L6×6×3⁄8, and the stairs are MC12×10.6 stringers with HSS1½×1½×3⁄16 mesh guardrails and 1¼-in. std. pipe grab rails. In total, the frame is constructed with 192 anchor rods, 77 column sections, 726 beams, 28 stair frames and 29 rail sections.

The frame has a ring beam at the bottom, with pilings built to support the structure. Anchor bolts were used to bridge the two-inch gap between the framing system and the silo walls, and the frame is also attached to the silo’s original cap and the bottom ring beam. The silo shaft walls are a 26-foot radius, while the columns are placed at a 25-foot, 3-inch radius.

The steel was lowered one piece at a time, with the main structure put together before the concrete floors were placed. There were also many legacy fittings in the old silo walls for water, sewer and rocket fuel lines that needed to be plugged. Hydraulic cement was injected into the pipes and compressed to permanently seal them. The silo walls were pressure-cleaning then sprayed with a closed-cell foam over the entire surface to provide a vapor barrier and a thermal break from the walls.

Limited visibility: Another challenge that made the project unusual was the limited visibility possible on the job site. Workers were required to rely solely on radio signals to safely and accurately construct the steel fittings for the building. One key benefit of building underground was highlighted by Ellen Jordan of Midland Steel when she noted, “At least we didn’t have to worry about it falling over.”

The luxury condominium building is an example of the innovative projects that Midland Steel is proud to construct. If you’re planning a building project, talk with Midland Steel about ways to make it a unique design that provides the amenities you want and need.

Structural Steel is Sustainable and Durable

The construction of a 2,000-square foot home requires between 50 and 60 trees, equal to about an acre of wooded area. When you compare that impact on the environment, versus the use of structural steel, it’s easy to see the benefits of steel. The same home can be built with the equivalent of six scrapped cars.

While this is an easy way to visualize the benefits that structural steel can offer, it’s really just the beginning. The push for sustainable, durable construction materials means that in residential and commercial building projects, it often makes sense to choose steel. Take a look at some of the reasons why:

Commercial: Steel has great durability and, among all building materials, has the best strength-to-weight ratio. Steel can also be great for saving on utilities, with reflective roofing materials that can cut heating and cooling costs by up to 40 percent.

Residential: A home made from structural steel can be constructed with completely recycled material. Residential roofs made from steel are also a good choice in warmer climates, where the steel can be painted to reflect solar energy.

Infrastructure projects: Constructing a bridge from structural steel offers savings in weight, which can lower the overall cost of the project. Likewise, utility poles offer strength at a lower weight than wood, making it less costly to transport and install. For highways, structural steel is a good choice for continuously reinforced concrete pavement, because it offers reduced resistance for cars and trucks and improves fuel economy.

The interest in recycled and sustainable materials is largely being promoted by the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) of the US Green Building Council. The LEED rating system offers a way to measure the recycled content of each construction material, providing a quantitative way to determine the environmental benefits of a particular building choice.

One of the significant ways that structural steel offers an advantage over other materials is its durability over time. This allows a building to have multiple functions over its lifetime, with the outer façade changed to adapt to the design preferences of the new owner or the functions of a new business. When a building is constructed with steel, it can be repurposed over and over without having to demolish the building and start with all new materials.

Choosing structural steel to benefit the environment is one of many good reasons that steel makes sense for your project. To learn more about additional benefits of using steel, talk with Midland Steel Company. We would welcome a chance to hear about your building plans and talk with you about the ways we can assist with your project.

Recycling is at the Top of the List For Reasons to Use Structural Steel

Structural steel has a lot of great qualities. It’s adaptable for custom design, its standard fittings make it easy to renovate or update and its composition makes it resistant to corrosion and rusting. It is also cost-effective and an efficient way to create a sturdy, well-built structure in a relatively short amount of time.

For all those compelling reasons to choose structural steel, there’s one quality that, for many people, is the top reason to use steel. For those that want to choose an economically-responsible plan for building, you can’t beat structural steel. Steel is a green choice, using a product that can be recycled again and again. Here are a few facts about recyclable structural steel:

There’s zero degradation: This means that you can recycle structural steel, again and again, without any damage at all to the composition of the material. Steel can be melted down an unlimited number of times without compromising the quality of the resulting building.

Recycling has big benefits: When you use recycled steel, it significantly reduces the environmental impact of your building project. Using recycled steel sheets instead of new steel from new materials requires 75 percent less energy.

It keeps steel out of landfills: When you recycle one kilogram of steel, it keeps two kilograms of greenhouse gases from impacting the atmosphere. It also keeps the material from being transported to a landfill, as well as reprocessing the material and conserving raw materials. For every ton of steel that is recycled, there is 1,131 kilograms of iron ore, 633 kilograms of coal and 54 kilograms of limestone conserved.

The environment benefits aren’t only through recycling: Using structural steel in your residential or industrial project offers additional environmental advantages. For instance, steel provides a sturdy structure that allows for more and heavier insulation. This saves you money on your heating and cooling costs and conserves energy. This also improves air quality, reducing the need for air purifies or humidifiers.

Steel endures: Once you build with structural steel, it will last forever. From high winds to earthquakes, steel is incredibly resilient and your structure will withstand any number of abuses. Even if you decide to renovate, your steel frame will accommodate expansion and redesign over and over again.

There are many reasons to use structural steel for your building project. Give us a call at Midland Steel Company to talk about your plans and why steel is your best choice for a successful process from start to finish.