World-renowned for its success merging Chinese culture and traditions with Catholic religious values, St. Mary’s Chinese Schools and Center has served
generations of Chinese Americans in San Francisco.
Located in historic Chinatown, the phased construction began with a below-grade parking garage. The new school is a five-story steel structure with a multi-finish exterior, and multiple play areas on the 2nd floor courtyard and rooftop. The interior includes new classrooms, science labs, media and library center, administrative offices, a chapel, pastor’s residence, and a multi-purpose gym and auditorium for community assembly. The facility was designed to Collaborative for High Performance Schools (CHPS) and LEED for School standards, focusing on indoor environmental quality. Participating in PG&E's Savings By Design program, the project exceeded Title 24 by 15%.
The jobsite required underpinning of the adjacent buildings required that 26 hand dug pits be excavated 40 feet deep and filled with reinforcing concrete. Herrero selected Malcolm Drilling as our tunneling sub, due to their significant experience tunneling in San Francisco and developed a comprehensive safety plan that integrated OSHA mining and tunneling inspectors in the preparation of our safety and work plan. The result—Herrero and our Malcolm completed the project without injury and with zero OSHA citations.
Phase II of the project was delayed due to fundraising efforts, replacement of the AOR, and a severely uncoordinated set of construction drawings. Herrero decided to 3D model the entire building from ACAD backgrounds and converted the MEPF to design build. To integrate the new architect into the project, Herrero paid the architect to create the base architectural model in Revit using our construction modeling standard families resulting in resolution of 90% of the potential RFIs and surfacing three significant code issues. This allowed the team to resolve the major issues in model space and resulted in reduced construction cost and schedule time.
