Abrego Apartment Complex
Hardy Frame® Special Moment Frames (SMF) were the ideal solution for Abrego in a soft-story retrofit of their 61-unit apartment.
“In a seismic event, soft-story buildings are prone to collapse,” said John Warkentin, a principle with KAMAP Property Management. A recent Los Angeles city ordinance required soft-story retrofits on thousands of buildings. Hardy Frame special moment frames (SMFs) protect the structure from a cataclysmic collapse in a seismic event.
For the soft-story Abrego Apartment complex, with its multiple stories above ground-level parking, narrow vertical supports – and the need to keep a garage with parking spaces – the retrofit solution had to be just right.
“We decided to use the Hardy Frame SMF, because we are very familiar with the product, and we’ve found it’s easy to install. Plus, the Hardy Frame SMF is the product that offered the least disruption to the tenants,” Morgan Jones explained.
Not only did HardyFrames address the soft-story issue, but as Morgan Jones put it, the “Hardy Frame SMF is pre-assembled and welded at the factory then delivered to the jobsite complete and ready to install…. [W]e were able to simply paint the SMFs so they blended right in with the building. It gave the finished job a good clean look.”