Project Team
Owner/Developer: Fifth Avenue Partners Ltd. - a joint venture of Stiles Corp., WLD Realty, Halmos Holdings and Whit Hudson.
General Contractor: Stiles Construction Co., Fort Lauderdale.
Architect: Cooper Carry Architects, Atlanta.

Stiles Construction Co., Fort Lauderdale, began work on the Bank of America Plaza at Las Olas City Centre project in December 2000, and completed construction by September 2002.

The 23-story mixed-use facility was designed by Cooper Carry Architects of Atlanta. The owner is a Stiles partnership, Fifth Avenue Partners Ltd., which includes Stiles, WLD Realty, Halmos Holdings Inc. and Whit Hudson. Various Stiles Corp. divisions are responsible for development, finance, construction, leasing and property management of the new complex.

The 411,000-sq.-ft. structure includes 365,801 sq. ft. of office space, as well as roughly 45,500 sq. ft. of ground-floor retail space. The new office building will be home to such tenants as Bank of America, Greenberg Traurig and Premiere Business Offices. The building includes a five-story parking garage, and features such as fiber-optic cable access to accommodate corporate and high-tech users' technology needs.

Las Olas City Centre is the latest mixed-use office and retail project to be located on Las Olas Boulevard in the center of downtown Fort Lauderdale. The project advances the trend toward densification and celebration of the urban experience as it has been conceived for downtown Fort Lauderdale.

The project consists of 17 stories of class-A office space positioned over a five-level, 1,000-plus-car parking structure. The entire office and parking components rest on a 22-ft.-high retail base found along the building's street level on all four sides. Atop Las Olas City Centre is a pyramid-shaped roof structure, out of which extends a 42-ft. spire that brings the building to its full height of 408 ft.

The building's structure is concrete. The parking deck's structure has two post-tensioned slabs with cast-in-place, post-tensioned beams. The office building portion has a post-tensioned skip joist system with a conventionally reinforced slab.

An innovative design was utilized for the parking structure's enclosure system. This system consisted of white horizontal cables 4 in. on center, vertically extending from floor to ceiling at each parking level. These cables act as an infill layer between the vertical precast elements that cadence down the street facades of the parking structure, and are similar to the aluminum glazing system prevalent in the tower skin above the deck.

Building facades with direct frontage to Las Olas Boulevard conceal the parking deck area with precast and window wall systems that are identical to the occupied office floors above. Together these enclosure systems screen the pedestrian from views into the parking facility while maintaining airflow requirements of the South Florida Building Code.

One of the early challenges was managing the amount of water encountered deep under the site. The project required the construction team to go down 20 ft. for pile caps and elevator pits. The unusual amount of water displacement was handled by pumping it out utilizing a filtration system.

Stiles Construction built the project in 20 months without a single work-stopping accident or injury.