SIUC Student Services Building

The Student Services Building serves as the new front door for SIU Carbondale. The sprawling complex houses 19 campus departments focused on various services, from admissions and financial aid, to career services and housing. It coalesces the services students need to get started and keep going at SIU, services that used to be scattered around campus, primarily in old and outdated buildings.

The Student Services Building consists of a 129,000 SF,  four story building with a partial underground mechanical space. The lobby of the building contains 3,600 SF of atrium glass, as well as a light fixture suspended 45 feet overhead. The facility is home to administrative offices and a welcome center with supporting spaces including meeting rooms, multi-purpose rooms, lobbies, and restroom facilities. The attic space is partially finished and provides additional space that can be occupied in the future.

DMA provided structural engineering services for the project from the programming phase through construction administration. Our engineers and designers performed seismic analysis, finite element analysis, and developed construction documents and specifications for all of the building structural systems. The facility is located in a high seismic zone, requiring the use of a special moment frame system. A seismic separation joint split the building into two separate frames. Building foundations consisted of drilled shafts to bedrock.

The project documentation was performed using Revit Building Information Modeling (BIM) computer software in order to identify and eliminate potential conflicts of structural elements with the complex HVAC systems.