Biggs Cardosa Associates’ Plaza Bridge at Marine Way Wins Highest Engineering Honor

The American Council of Engineering Companies, California (ACEC California) announced today that Biggs Cardosa Associates has been honored with their prestigious 2020 Golden State Award for its work on the Plaza Bridge at Marine Way, in Irvine, California. The Golden State Award is the highest honor ACEC California bestows as part of its annual Engineering Excellence Awards program.

“Biggs Cardosa Associates’ mission is to deliver innovative, high quality, cost-effective, dependable structural design, engineering, project management, construction management, and inspection services for their clients,” said Brad Diede, Executive Director of ACEC California. “The Plaza Bridge project substantiates their high-standard. Biggs Cardosa is well-deserving of this award.”

Having outgrown its headquarters in Irvine, tech company Broadcom sought a new home. Hoping to keep the company in the city, the City’s planning commission approved a master plan for a two-million-square-foot research and development campus on property owned by developer FivePoint on the border of the Orange County Great Park. The site consisted of two parcels bisected by a new road, Marine Way. Because Broadcom needed a landscaped central courtyard for all its employees, the master plan called for creating a 398-foot by 130-foot landscaped Plaza Bridge – essentially the size of a football field – over Marine Way at the heart of campus.

Biggs Cardosa was the prime consultant responsible for providing structural design consultation services and coordinating a team of subconsultants under a modified design-build contract with DPR Construction.

The Plaza Bridge is a cast-in-place concrete slab supporting the landscaped park. The structural design had to meet strict fire code requirements for tunnels and be able to resist a worst-case scenario 13,000-gallon gasoline tanker fire combined with a heavy goods vehicle loaded with combustibles. Biggs Cardosa’s unique fire protection strategy combined atypically high rebar clearances and high concentrations of polypropylene fibers, an inexpensive yet robust alternative to typical fire protection systems.

The 2020 Golden State Award winner was selected out of 48 projects and announced at the Engineering Excellence Awards banquet in Los Angeles on February 13, 2020. The awards dinner also served as a fundraiser for the ACEC California Scholarship Foundation 501(c)3, which provides scholarship awards to graduate and undergraduate college students that are recognized for their notable and outstanding academic achievements.

Photographs of the Golden State Award winner and all Honor and Merit Award winning projects can be found here.

For more information about Biggs Cardosa Associates, Inc., visit www.biggscardosa.com.

ACEC California is a statewide association representing over 1,000 private consulting engineering and land-surveying firms that average 20 employees each. ACEC California is dedicated to enhancing the consulting engineering and land surveying professions, protecting the general public and promoting the use of the private sector in the growth and development of our state. Our members provide services for all phases of planning, designing and constructing projects. For more information, visit www.acec-ca.org.

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