Spotlight on Montgomery County Justice Center

We’re thrilled to bring back #SchnabelSpotlights, a series sharing interesting projects and celebrating our talented teams! This Schnabel Spotlight features our work on the Montgomery County Justice Center.

Schnabel’s Geostructural team provided several design-build support of excavation (SOE) designs as part of the Montgomery County Justice Center expansion project in Norristown, PA. The project will add a 325,000 square foot building connected to the existing courthouse and will reconstruct and expand the existing Hancock square park from 23,000 square feet to 57,000 square feet.

Our team developed an innovative scheme to reuse an existing concrete garage wall as an SOE to allow for a faster demolition of the garage. This reuse of the existing structure saved time and expense for our client.

Schnabel also designed a soldier pile and tieback wall as the SOE below an existing, approximate 150-year-old masonry residential building and a 38 ft tall soil nail wall to support the remaining excavated areas.

We provided design services for the pit underpinning for the courthouse to allow open excavation adjacent to the building and design and testing of rock tiedowns for the foundations of the new structure.

Thanks to the work of Schnabel and our partners, the Montgomery Justice Center will merge the historic with modern, while also expanding public greenspace in Norristown’s city center.