ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. (March 22, 2021) – The new three-story 48,000 square-foot Joseph H. Lang, Sr. Student Success Center on the Gibbs campus of St. Petersburg College (SPC) was designed to provide students with a unique centralized hub for all the essential services they would need under one roof. The design encourages collaboration and embodies the college’s focus on community, offering an open concept for students, employees, and visitors.
Rhyno Glass, a leading Florida contractor, specializing in high-end interior and exterior commercial glazing, was the glazing contractor. Rhyno performed the project’s extensive interior and exterior glazing scope, including a two-story curtain wall feature, glass partitions, and glass fronts for offices, classrooms, and meeting rooms. The exterior curtainwall created an indoor/outdoor connection offering expansive views of the lake at the front of the campus. A significant part of the project was overcoming code challenges. The project required portions of the two-story exterior curtainwall feature to achieve a 60-minute fire rating. The curtainwall also had to meet hurricane impact requirements and free span 26 feet without intermediate support.
Rhyno designed and installed a fire glazing technique involving the reconfiguration of the curtainwall design to include monolithic sheets of safety glass mounted to the inside mullions of the curtainwall to create a flat uninterrupted surface. This, combined with a deluge fire sprinkler system, solved the code challenges and provided substantial cost savings. “Our ability to bring innovative solutions to complex problems is one of the reasons we become involved so early in the design process,” says Wyatt Castellvi, President Rhyno Glass. “We find that the closer we collaborate, the better the end result.
SPC was founded in 1927 as St. Petersburg Junior College and became Florida’s first two-year college.Today, SPC’s alumni rank first in Florida for earning the highest entry income among state community college graduates. www.spcollege.edu.
