Best Specialty Construction: Hollywood Hard Rock Hotel

The main attraction of the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino’s $1.5-billion expansion is the new 36-story, 450-ft-tall guitar-shaped hotel.

Totaling 600,000 sq ft with nearly 640 rooms, the hotel’s unique profile is sure to strike a chord with music lovers. But it took skilled personnel and innovative ideas to turn the unique design into reality in less than a year.Varying floor sizes were critical to creating the structure’s unique curved shape.

The design utilized conventional shear walls, post-tensioned slabs and reinforced columns. However, exterior columns at the curves are sloped by as much as 40 degrees, requiring them to remain fully supported during construction.The solution was a complex system of cantilevered bracing that spanned multiple floors, which themselves required different slab thicknesses.

With the hotel’s height limited by its close proximity to an airport, the project team saved inches by using post-tension slabs with sufficient reinforcement. As a result, the thickness of the slabs range from 9 in. to 12 in.