Enabling a New Era of Shipbuilding.

Multiphase Project Brings Heavy Industry to Mobile

Gray’s initial scope for the project included design-build services for a 460,000 s.f. modular manufacturing facility (MMF) for producing the Littoral Combat Ship and the Joint High Speed Vessel for the U.S. Navy. As the project neared completion, Austal added modifications to an existing pre-engineered building to Gray’s scope. In 2011, Austal turned to Gray to complete a 393,000 s.f. Phase II expansion of its MMF production bay, as well as Phase III—a greenfield 108,000 s.f., three-story office complex on the Mobile campus.

The manufacturing spaces include 93′ tall steel sliding doors, 47 overhead cranes, aviation-style fabric doors rated for 135 mph winds, while the office complex—five modules totaling 20,000 s.f.—features a nautical theme with high-end finishes, a curved glass façade, cherry wood panels, and a reconfigurable multi-purpose room with auditorium-style seating for up to 400.

The limited available footprint for the campus’s office structure presented a unique challenge for the project team. As one Austal official put it, the office complex was built “on a work site the size of a postage stamp,” and utilized nearly 70% of the remaining space on Austal’s campus, which included the existing and expanding MMF, a pre-engineered warehouse, a U.S. Navy facility, and a parking area. Between active construction and the customer’s ongoing shipbuilding operations, the site allowed little room for staging building materials. Despite these challenges, the Gray team delivered an award-winning project that allowed the customer to maintain its production schedule for the Navy contract.

Following construction of the manufacturing bays and offices, Austal selected Gray to design and build an expansion to its carbon steel panel production line, which puts the total area of the complex over 1 million s.f.