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Mercedes-Benz Successor Vehicle Plant Expansion
When Mercedes asked Kahn to design a large addition to the Tuscaloosa County, Alabama, automotive assembly plant it had designed a few years earlier, Kahn designers firmly endorsed Mercedes’ suggestion that the addition be joined to the original in a single, continuous building. The project’s difficulty, however, would lay in its phasing – the planning and coordination of the project’s step-by-step building process. The original plant resembled a sideways “L,” with vehicle assembly housed in the leg of the L. Finished vehicles emerged from that leg and were driven and parked to await shipment in the marshalling yard – a large outdoor space at the lower end of the sideways L. The addition would be built as a new leg, jutting from that lower end, essentially turning the upside-down L into a C. Yet cars emerging from assembly would still need to be parked in the same marshalling yard, which would now be on the other side of the new construction site. more...
And there was a second, related, problem: The plant and the yard occupy a federal free-trade zone (FTZ) – a special designation that relieves the manufacturer of certain tariffs and regulations. That zone had to remain secure; even construction workers could not be allowed inside it. Kahn’s creative phasing solution: i) Construct a tunnel from the existing assembly area, under the site of the future addition, to the marshalling yard; ii) secure the tunnel, which would become part of the FTZ; and iii) build the addition on the ground above the tunnel, where construction workers could circulate freely. Once complete, the addition would also become part of the FTZ. This imaginative resolution not only enabled the assembly plant to continue producing vehicles without pause but it also completely satisfied the strict free-trade zone rules governing the site.
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