By Alan M. Petrillo
The Delhi Township (OH)Fire Department has been providing fire service to the township since 1935, currently operating out of three stations with 60 paid full-time firefighters. The township, surrounded on three sides by the city of Cincinnati, had to replace the station in the eastern section of its district, a structure built in 1956 with 890 square feet of living space and two apparatus bays that now handles 52 percent of the fire department's calls.
Douglas S. Campbell Jr., Delhi Township's chief, says the department "needed to replace that station with something more suited to our staffing levels. We wanted a station to address future growth because the business district is in that fire company's response area, which is about 10 square miles and has about 30,000 residents."
Campbell says he had built stations for the department in 2001 and 2003 and took the opportunity to evaluate both of those facilities and discuss with firefighters what they liked about those stations and, as important, what they didn't like. "The personnel created a laundry list of likes and dislikes that came out to six pages of items," he notes. "Then we met with Mark Shoemaker, director of public facilities at KZF Design, who was engaged as the project's criteria architect, and prioritized those items, which he then had to sell to the design-build team of SMP Design and Turner Construction."
Shoemaker says that in Ohio, for a municipality to do a design-build project, it is required to hire a criteria architect. In that role, he says KZF Design prepared a narrative that described each architectural requirement for the new station, and provided an outline of all room finishes and mechanical equipment requirements. "The RFP (request for proposal) included a site diagram and a list of the specific requirements for each room as well as room data sheets, which establishes the quality level for the project," Shoemaker says. "We also developed a short list of design-builders who could take on the project."
Shoemaker points out that the two biggest challenges facing the team were that the site was restrictive because it sloped in the back, being a very deep but small property. The second challenge was making the station fit into the character of the residential neighborhood, as the location has residences on each side.
Kevin Spector, chief creative officer for SMP Design, notes, "The site had a pretty decent slope on it, and the back of the site had a swale with some woodland that had very wet soil. Turner Construction consulted with Delhi township and figured out how to fix the situation with a limited budget. Turner had successfully tilled lime into soil on a previous project because lime uses water to make a stronger soil. So that's what they did on the Delhi site, meaning they didn't have to drill piers to get down to rock, which would have been much more expensive."
Spector says the new station would be the largest building in the residential neighborhood of older homes with pitched roofs. "We wanted to be sensitive to the neighbors from an architectural point of view, so we designed a station scaled to human scale that looked like it belonged there," he points out. "We used a hip roof to bring down the roof line, and gables to break up the size. It's a block building with brick veneer on the upper parts, and stone on the bottom, giving the eye an interplay or layering of limestone and brick elements."
SMP Design also incorporated elements from Delhi Township's other two stations, Spector says. "We used the material package from the othe