Renovation on the University of Illinois’s Education Building on the Urbana Champaign campus bring much-needed updates to building services in a fifty-six-year-old structure. The project replaced aging elevators and renovated toilet rooms to new accessibility and diversity standards. TKB’s work first developed a scope of work to fit within the available funds and priorities, reviewing potential scope models with the project team’s cost estimator and University’s Facilities and Services Department. The final scope focused on expanding women’s restrooms, creating a new all-gender toilet room, and replacing both building elevators in phased construction. Vertical transportation is now fully accessible and updated, and the new women’s and all-gender toilet rooms are code-compliant, accessible, and better matched to current student demographics.
Maintaining functional use of the building throughout construction was the most significant project challenge, requiring consecutive modernization of the north and south elevators. Continuous access to an operating elevator and toilet rooms was achieved by overlaying two critical path tracks for long elevator lead times and the toilet room renovations.