Element Hotel Nashville

Faced with logistical constraints while building the LEED-certified Element Nashville Vanderbilt West End hotel, our team coordinated carefully with the businesses, residents and special events that are part of the vibrant oneC1TY community.

Crain Construction crews are accustomed to working on tight sites. This one is on a 1.4-acre brownfield site that bumps up against 28th Avenue, which provides the only street access.

A domino effect of continual challenges also led our project team to adapt and change the construction process of the Element hotel. Covid closed factories, delaying materials, so our team installed materials as they arrived and not in the typical order of construction.

Project highlights:

• As a design/build MEP project pre-construction included extensive coordination with the entire design team, and the project benefitted from a lot of value engineering.
• Site work included drilling 84 caissons down to solid rock, some 8-20 feet, to stabilize the soil.
• The hotel is five floors of prefabricated stick framing on a concrete podium that bears on caissons. Anticipating price increases, Crain Construction purchased wood early, saving the client thousands of dollars. Prefabricated walls shaved a month off installation.
• Since all sides of the property are public facing, all back-of-house installations (loading docks, generators, HVAC, compact dumpsters) were placed within the building’s interior.
• Swing stages were used while working on exterior walls since pavers and roofing were already installed.
• Metro inspections were videotaped and sent to the client so they wouldn’t have to be onsite during the coronavirus.