Two hundred and thirty eight years ago, a group of Patriots dumped 342 tea crates into Boston Harbor to protest Great Britain’s tea tax on the American Colonies. Today, using state-of-the-art virtual models and collaboration tools, Suffolk Construction is building the structure that will pay tribute to this seismic event in American History and house one of the original tea crates that was dumped in the Harbor on that fateful day.
The $27 million, 18,700 square-foot Boston Tea Party Ships & Museum project will be approximately twice its original size and will consist of a two-story, bridge house pier structure supported by piles and a 350-ton, 200-foot floating barge. The pier building will contain a retail store, two re-enactment meeting rooms, and offices. Three historic replica ships will surround the floating barge, which will house a museum on the first floor and a Tavern/Tea Room on the second level.
The Future Meets The Past
State-of-the-art Building Information Models (BIM) were used to coordinate the installation of extensive mechanical systems throughout the Boston Tea Party Ships & Museum project. For example, the virtual models helped the team realize that the structural constraints of the tight attic spaces would not enable all the mechanical, electrical, and plumbing components to properly fit. The end result was the seamless coordination of a complex installation process in both the pier building and barge structure.
Before-and-after virtual models of the tight attic space in the barge structure.
