No, the new four-story parking structure at Legoland in Carlsbad, California, is not built with Legos—sorry for the disappointment. But the $20-million garage is definitely unique. The city of Carlsbad doesn’t want grey monstrosities blighting its lovely Pacific landscape, so it has strict height and visibility requirements for parking structures.
“Most parking structures generally have two to four bays, but given the height limits and the restraints of the site itself, this one is six bays wide,” says Spencer Yoder, senior preconstruction manager for McCarthy Building Companies Inc., and leader of the company’s parking structure preconstruction group in Southern California and Nevada.
McCarthy was the perfect company for the job. With 18 offices in 10 states, employee-owned McCarthy works on numerous parking projects, including a previous garage at Legoland. To meet the city’s aesthetic requirements for the new 372,000-square-foot, 1,130-stall structure, McCarthy painted it off-white and added Spanish-inspired tile inlays and wood trellises on the top level “to break up that basically hard, solid, horizontal line that is the top of a parking structure,” Yoder says. “It definitely doesn’t look like a big gray box.”
Given Legoland’s proximity to the coast, the project had to meet additional requirements, including a state coastal development permit to verify that the structure does not infringe on wildlife areas. City code also required 5% of the stalls to have charging stations for electric vehicles.
“The entitlement process itself was a little longer than a typical parking structure may be, but that wasn’t unexpected,” says Yoder. “We’ve developed some good relationships with the city, we knew who to talk to, knew where we needed to go to get things done and keep things moving along.”
BRICK BY BRICK
McCarthy broke ground on the project in March 2024 with the removal of an existing asphalt surface lot. Among the challenges? Safely managing the flow of employees and guests at the popular park, which receives roughly 3 million visitors each year.
“There are tens of thousands of patrons onsite each day,” says Yoder. “Our typical construction week—Monday through Friday, sometimes Saturday—coincided directly with their typical open hours. On a concrete pour day, we were out there at 3:30 or 4:00 a.m. to get our pour done, get trucks offsite and get out of there before any patrons arrived, just to eliminate any chance of interaction between the heavy equipment and somebody coming in their minivan with their family.”
NOT A SNAP DECISION
The most intriguing part of the project: McCarthy used a new concrete maturity-monitoring technology to save time and reduce costs. When pouring a concrete deck, workers test the compressive strength by sending 5-10 cylinders of concrete to a laboratory, where the foot-high, four-inch-wide cylinders are then broken in a hydraulic press. Parking structures in Southern California are built with a post-tension cable deck, and if the five-inch-thick concrete isn’t the correct strength—around 3,000 PSI—the ends of the cables can pull out and snap.
“It is an exceedingly dangerous situation,” Yoder says.
As part of its innovative new approach, McCarthy pours sensors into the slabs. The sensors “understand what the relative strength will be at any given time based on the heat of the concrete as it cures,” Yoder says. “The idea is to speed things along and give us real-time data so that eventually we can come to the site on a Monday morning and have data from the whole weekend from a Friday pour, and know immediately if we’re good to go. We’ll still need a signoff from a structural engineer, but it could eliminate the need to have that third-party lab.”
That boost in speed is important for staying on schedule, especially on a project like this, where the garage has an unusual shape.
“Generally, we like a concrete deck to be poured in as close to a square shape as possible,” Yoder says. “With this one, our concrete pours would span a width of up to maybe 360 feet, which is about double what we would typically like to see. If we lose a day in there, that offsets the whole schedule by over a week.”
This project, however, is definitely on track. The parking structure is scheduled to open in late 2025, but was largely finished by April. That makes Yoder happy, but his favorite part of any project is the topping-out day, when the last concrete deck is poured and when full carpenter and finishing crews—all McCarthy-employed union workers—are working onsite with a full reinforcing crew.
“Between those three groups, there are at least 65 individuals up on top of this building, working together simultaneously,” he says. “It’s a beautiful thing to see everybody just move so smoothly.” The teams come together seamlessly—kind of like Legos.
