Overview
Situated along the Potomac River in Washington, D.C., Georgetown University’s campus features a wide variety of academic and residential structures that have been constructed over its 234-year history. Each of the 61 campus structures—from the 1792 National Historic Landmark Healy Hall to the 2016 LEED Gold certified Pedro Arrupe S.J. Hall dormitory—are uniquely designed to capitalize on the multifaceted terrain of the area and to support student learning and living. Because the campus holds a variety of facility types, the University required a comprehensive picture of maintenance, repair, and restoration needs to anticipate the service life of each building as well as a detailed profile regarding possibilities for expansion.
Incomplete or missing information on building conditions across campus further complicated the task of deciding which problems to address first and where to allocate limited resources best. In 2021, our Diagnostics Groups in Washington, D.C., and New York worked together to perform a campus-wide structural and building enclosure assessment for Georgetown University. Unlike a typical assessment scope, we adapted our approach to specifically align with the University’s need to develop a long-term capital investment strategy.
“Ultimately, the University’s team understood our team was well-suited to perform this evaluation due to the firm’s expertise in historic preservation, historic masonry repair, enclosure diagnostics, and structural diagnostics related to traditional and modern higher education construction,” says Steven Treser, principal and managing director for Walter P Moore’s Diagnostics Group in Washington, D.C.
The schedule established with the University’s facilities team was ambitious; it included assessing three to four buildings per week. Each building assessment included reviewing the existing documents, interviewing facilities personnel, visually surveying both the interior and exterior, and documenting distress and deterioration.
Our team streamlined their workflow process to share site notes and photos from the on-site staff to in-office team members, compressing the lag time between each assessment and report. A standardized approach was established across the entire team for the assessments, with checklists and continuous coordination. Regardless of which team member performed the assessment, they could hand off their field work to another team member working on the report.
As part of the assessment, our team met weekly with the University’s facilities staff. During each meeting, the previous week’s reports and an overview of the assessments were presented. The working sessions allowed the team to answer any questions, receive real-time feedback, and coordinate updated reports or perform additional assessments as necessary. “Each week, we would compile and present the reports from the previous weeks’ building assessments while concurrently conducting the next set of evaluations,” Treser says. “To be able to meet the schedule, two to four engineers were on-site at any given time.”
The assessment schedule was consistently maintained for over five months, and the campus-wide evaluation of all 61 campus structures was completed in February 2022. The team’s coordination enabled them to meet the tight timeline while maintaining a commitment to excellence in the quality of deliverables.
Building Assessment Summary
In March 2022, a summary of the campus-wide assessment was presented to the University’s facilities staff. The summary thoroughly outlined the methodology and explained each aspect of the evaluations, which included a spreadsheet of all 640 observations of distress and deterioration.
The data was organized for easy use by the University’s team with sorted and categorized descriptions and locations. Each report detailed each deterioration or distressed condition observed by our team and summarized corresponding repair recommendations. “The observed conditions and recommendations were divided into high, medium, and low priority categories emphasizing life safety and preserving critical assets,” Treser says.
The prioritized schedule of repairs allowed the University to budget more effectively and accurately, optimized repair sequencing to reduce downtime, capitalized on setup and staging, and reduced the likelihood of damage to adjacent areas from ill-timed repairs. With detailed building component information, comparative condition evaluations, itemized repair recommendations, photographic documentation of critical problem areas, and construction cost estimates, the campus-wide assessment provided a written record of campus facilities. As a result, the assessment serves as a roadmap for the care and upkeep of the buildings and as a snapshot of the state of Georgetown’s current structural assets.
In the future, Georgetown University is well-positioned to preserve its distinguished architecture collection while addressing its future growth and footprint.
Highlights
- Diagnostics Study
- Assessed 61 Structures
- Provided Direction for Remediation
External Project Team
Owner: Georgetown University
Diagnostics Engineer: Walter P Moore
Internal Project Team
Principal in Charge: Steven Treser
Project Engineers: Nouha Javed
