Projects

It’s not often in the engineering world that you’ll find such a serendipitous project as the KICKER World Headquarters. In the 1970s, Rose PE founder Paul Rose was a college DJ building his own speakers. He purchased parts from a small startup in Stillwater, OK. That startup became what we know today as KICKER. Fast-forward 40 years, and the DJ-turned-engineer was working alongside architect Stan Espinosa to design their 280,000-square-foot headquarters.

This new headquarters was an addition to KICKER’s existing manufacturing facility, which had to stay operational throughout the project. The addition involved a new office block and showroom. The showroom, which also serves as a museum packed with hot rods, is a circular and glass two-story space with unique architectural features such as a floating mezzanine and custom stairs with glass floor and tread elements.

When approaching the project, we knew the front entry needed to reflect the evolutionary history of KICKER products. We designed a stark monolithic board-formed concrete element that juxtaposes the sleek design of the round showroom. The element was designed to appear massive, but we used a creative form and void system to make it lighter, yet still structurally useful.

Throughout the project, we maintained consistent contact with the owner, contractors and architect to ensure an efficient and tailored design that exceeded expectations.

If you ever plan to visit Tulsa, OK, you’d be remiss to skip over Cherry Street. This eclectic shopping and dining hub is a popular destination for elevated restaurants, high-end boutiques and one-of-a-kind experiences.

Rose PE was approached about a project on a tight site in the Cherry Street District with a particular set of challenges. The design was five stories tall with a full basement. The top floor also had an open-air bar and restaurant.

While five stories alone offers a host of structural challenges, the building basement extended below the water table creating problems with support and drainage. The basement was to be an exclusive, speakeasy-style restaurant and consistent flooding wasn’t conducive to business. To overcome these water issues, we used a nontraditional foundation system called micropiles (small-diameter piles grouted into holes to support structures) to get the foundation to bedrock. This eliminated the drainage problems and set up the building for a long lifetime.

The architect, Joel Slaughter, designed the building to blend in with the architecture on Cherry Street with creative use of mass and scale. The building was also adjacent to an older masonry building that was incorporated into the design. This created some unique framing in areas to meet these requirements.

Today, 1515 15th Street stands tall filled with successful businesses and beautiful apartment lofts.

When the eastern power supply is on the line, you need a demolition engineer you can trust. The Tennesee Valley Authority was preparing to demolish the retired Widows Creek Fossil Plant and sought a partner to ensure a safe and efficient demolition.

Rose PE has a long history of working with Dykon Explosive Demolition, the blaster on the project, so it was a natural fit for our team. Our goal was to design the preparation for demolition so that the structures remain safe and stable until implosion. The structures included two boiler houses, two 500-foot stacks and a 1,000-foot stack.

We worked to determine which members or portions of the structure to remove for a predicted fall direction and collapse to avoid a massive power disruption for the eastern seaboard. That pressure aside, there were a number of challenges going into the demolition. The columns in the boiler houses were heavily plated which required modifications to accept the explosives. The 1,000-ft stack and real star of the show required infills and modifications to the shell to get an acceptable fall direction. We’re happy to report that all went to plan.

When tackling this project, we really need to understand the structures inside and out. This necessitated a lot of fieldwork and creative approaches to keep the contractor moving through the buildings while preparing for demolition.

Courtesy TVA

Photo/Video Courtesy TVA Web Team.

The Trenton Channel Power Plant, owned by DTE Energy, was a coal-burning power station completed in 1924 in Trenton, Michigan. Officially decommissioned in 2022, the nearly 100-year-old plant was set for demolition. This included two 600-foot stacks and two 200-foot boiler structures.

Due to the plant’s close proximity to the Detroit River, a historic bridge, and existing buildings, the team faced several site limitations and blasting considerations. Additionally, the more recent boiler house was asymmetrical and had massive equipment in the lower part of the building that could impede collapse. To address this challenge, a carefully planned weakening and blast sequence allowed for a successful collapse with a very low debris pile.

Just before dawn on demolition day, the two iconic smokestacks fell in less than a minute.

Video courtesy of DTE Energy.

Video courtesy of DTE Energy.

The roof of a nearly 100-year-old building collapsed under the weight of snow and ice in Cleveland, OK. While it was clear what had happened, Rose PE was hired to establish the why and how to repair it. We determined the damaged portions of the existing structures and what could be salvaged or repaired in order to restore the building.

Because of the historic design of the century-old structure, we needed to be familiar with the materials and construction from this era. It can be challenging to find an engineer who knows how to integrate new construction with old while meeting current building code requirements. Thanks to decades of experience, Rose understood the materials and techniques necessary to bring this building back to life.

On November 5, 2011, a 5.7 magnitude earthquake hit Shawnee, OK. While Oklahoma is traditionally known for high winds and tornadoes, an earthquake of this magnitude was nearly unheard of. The near epicenter of the quake struck St. Gregory’s University, the oldest Catholic college in Oklahoma. All four turrets on the century-old, Tudor-style Benedictine Hall were damaged. One turret had collapsed, one had to be demolished immediately to prevent collapse on the existing roof, and the remaining two had to be dismantled to save the decorative elements.

Rose PE performed a site investigation into the earthquake damage to the main building to help determine structural vulnerabilities and condemn unsound buildings.