61 State Street

The hotel is a 50-key, four-story, 45,000 square foot boutique hotel located in historic downtown Charleston.  The building includes covered parking, a ground floor bar/dining area, a mezzanine-level conference room, and a roof deck at the fourth floor. 

The structure includes a tall concrete-framed 2nd Floor, supported by concrete columns and shear walls.  The 2nd Floor also serves as a transfer slab to support the floors above, which consist of cold-formed steel stud bearing walls supporting long-span composite concrete and metal deck floors. The lateral system of this upper portion of the building is comprised of concentric steel braced frames. Designing a building in the Charleston area presented a number of structural challenges.  The city’s location on the Atlantic Coast required consideration of hurricane-force winds, while the low site elevation also exposed the ground floor areas to flooding and storm surge hydrodynamic loads.  The region is also the most seismically-active area in the eastern United States, requiring “Special” seismic detailing of the concrete and steel lateral systems.  This added complexity to the structure and the interface between the two framing systems, which occurs at the 2nd Floor transfer slab.