Virginia Academy

The Project

A 62,000 SF three-story school that serves as a K-12 private school for the Community Church. The building was built immediately adjacent to the existing Community Church building and achieves the church’s goal of providing high quality education to members and non-members alike.

The building sits on a sloping site next to a retention pond, creating geotechnical and foundation design challenges. Ehlert Bryan served as the structural engineer of record for the project, with a construction cost of approximately $32 million.

Structural Features

The Virginia Academy is a structural steel building with chevron-braced frames and composite slabs on metal deck.

The main structural feature of the building is the gym, which the owner and architect envisioned as a small stadium capable of seating hundreds of guests for basketballs complete with a hanging structural steel-supported LED scoreboard.

An atypical layout, there is a level of classrooms above the gym before the building roof. Ehlert Bryan designed full-story, 16-foot deep steel trusses to span across the gym and nest inside the classroom partition walls above.

In addition to the gym, the building features an impressive monumental staircase framed with HSS tube steel that serves as the focal point of the building’s main entrance as well as a concrete flood wall to hold back the retention pond during a possible flood event.

Intec served as the architect of record for this iconic school project.