Texas State University breaks ground on an Infrastructure Research Laboratory

Texas State University in San Marcos has begun construction on a $14 million Infrastructure Research Laboratory. 

The facility will become the third building at Texas State's 58-acre STAR Park, joining the 36,000-square-foot STAR One technology incubator and the Archives and Research Center, the university says in a news release. 

The 11,471-square-foot facility will support the Ingram School of Engineering's Civil Engineering program and will be a hub for technology-enhanced infrastructure research. 

It will have a 3-foot-thick reinforced concrete strong floor with tie-down anchorages and lateral reaction walls, along with two overhead cranes independently capable of carrying 30 tons. A comprehensive range of hydraulic actuators, pumps and closed loop loading systems will permit the application of static, dynamic and fatigue loads, and a variety of data acquisition systems will enable the facility to use a variety of testing configurations for studying the behavior of structural elements and systems.

The architect is Alamo Architects and the contractor is Bartlette Cocke General.