The Silver Ramp, completed in June 2020, is a 5,000-stall parking structure located at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. The project lives in the center of several transportation hubs, but throughout construction had minimal interruptions to planes, trains and cars. The team worked closely with the project’s owner, Metropolitan Airports Commission, and air traffic control to ensure constant communication around airspace restrictions. Patron train safety was also taken into consideration throughout the project as the new structure was built over an operational light rail station. Through careful planning, the project caused no major travel delays.

Even during the wettest winter on record, the team pushed onward and took a phased project approach. The flexible schedule allowed the team to work around busy travel seasons and ensure little-to-no interruption to visitors at the airport. 

If the airplanes in the distance don’t catch your attention, the Silver Ramp’s exterior surely will. The structure is covered in 58,000 terracotta baguettes on one side of its façade. The beautiful piece of art is just the beginning to the jaw-dropping aesthetic on the exterior of the parking structure. The project’s additional architectural point is the exposed concrete core structure wrapped in curtainwall glazing with 6 glass elevator shafts. 

The Silver Ramp features an eight-story atrium. The vast size of the space made it difficult to gauge conditions within this indoor environment. The project team strategically placed Job Site Insights™ (JSI^TM) smart sensors throughout the atrium to ensure temperature and humidity stayed within specified ranges. The sensors indicated the space was too dry to correctly install millwork, even where the damp winter had been an earlier concern. The project team was immediately notified and installed a humidifier to solve the issue and correctly install the millwork, without the risk of potential rework.

The ability to monitor the site remotely removed the need for manual temperature and humidity readings and prevented the team from installing millwork in too dry of an environment. The sensors and their alerts to the project team saved valuable time and money. The data produced by the JSI^TM sensors gave the client confidence the product was being installed in a controlled environment, within manufacturers’ specified ranges for temperature and humidity.