2023 Associated Masonry Contractors of Houston Golden Trowel Excellence Award - Residential (Multi-Family)

>>> Gables Westcreek, now known as Crimson, is a high end 14-story apartment building showcased in an upscale and trendy area off of 610 just outside of the Galleria.  The majority of the building is clad in masonry and also includes CMU back-up at parapets.  It’s imposing size, location, and unique shape of this project shows off what masonry can do to affect the appearance of residential construction.  A stroll around the 83,000 SF building will reveal details such as radiused segmented walls in small areas around the storefront utilizing two colors of brick.  The general design fits into the architecture of the new construction that has risen in the immediate area, as well as standing alone as a recognizable building in the horizon.

The sheer size and layout of this building created its own monumental tasks of how to access and stock the project.  A combination of tubular welded frame scaffold, multi-point suspended swing stage scaffold and lightweight swing stage scaffold was utilized, thus enabling work on multiple areas simultaneously in order to keep pace with the construction schedule.  The building itself has a very large footprint which made the distribution of men and materials quite challenging.  The brick and mortar materials for the upper floors were stocked on each level and then fed to the masons through window openings. 

This building contained multiple design elements that have brick continually going in and out all around the building which warranted extensive preplanning on how to access the various planes of the facade.  Other items of note are: the building cantilevers in some areas, small ribbons of brick in areas, protruding and recessed accent bands and various different roof heights.

To better understand the magnitude of masonry on this project, over 830,000 king sized brick were used on the exterior of the building in two different colors along with thin brick, cast stone, ground-faced CMU and over 73,000 units of regular CMU.

Originally, CMS was scheduled to complete the project in phases, however, due to acceleration requirements, CMS was tasked with installing multiple phases simultaneously.