Ohio State University’s North Residential District Transformation project, located in the northeast corner of the university’s Columbus campus, comprises eight new residence halls for more than 3,800 students, two dining halls and a fitness center. The entire scope of work covered more than 1.1 million sq ft of new construction and also required demolition of 11 buildings as well as replacement of all infrastructure and landscaping. With a student population of nearly 65,000, OSU is one of the country’s largest universities, and the school’s need to modernize itself is constant. The development proved to be the state of Ohio’s largest design-build project at $320 million, though Messer Construction Co.’s various techniques saved more than $10 million off the original budget. Such techniques included OSU’s first use of polypropylene waterlines, the utilization of onsite dirt rather than granular backfill and the use of an electronic document-sharing program, Latista, to dramatically reduce printing costs.

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