New construction in Center City Philadelphia presents several challenges, such as space constraints as well as pressure to build the next impressive piece of the skyline. On January 18, 2020, Silvi Group Companies, along with GBCA member Bucks Concrete Services, performed the mat foundation pour for The Laurel project. Scheduled to be completed in 2021, this project will be the tallest primarily residential, luxury high-rise building in the city.
Starting at 2:30am and taking 9 hours, the total pour was 4360 cubic yards of concrete. Because of the size of the project, the concrete mix design was 6,000 PSI with 70% slag. The pour used 119 trucks and 5 plants.
From Construction Equipment Guide:
Silvi stated that to place the concrete, the crew started the pour with four direct dump sites where the concrete could go straight from the truck to a man-made funnel that carried the concrete to man-man wooden slides. This allowed them to pour the concrete at a high rate of speed from Walnut Street.
In conjunction with the slide, they also had two telebelts unloading trucks (one on Sansom St. and one on Walnut St.). Using this configuration, they were able to unload six trucks at the same time into the mat.
