Elizabethtown, Kentucky
Hardin County Government Building
- Architect
- ICON Engineering
- General Contractor
- Alliance Corporation
- Size
- 66,000 Sq. Ft. - 4 stories
- Project Type
- Government Building
Challenge
Multi-story government owned facility to house most county services including the county clerk’s office, sheriff’s office, property valuation administration, E-911, judge-executive office and others.
Achieve energy efficient criteria in claim federal tax deductions.
Solution
Using the SHIELD™ 8-inch R-34 curtain walls attached to steel moment resisting frames.
Result
After the evaluation, the building qualified for the full $1.80/sf deduction providing ICON Engineering with a $118,800 deduction.
Why this approach fit
Commentary from our editorial team. The challenge, solution and result above are the project record as reported by Guardian Structural.
This project is the clearest tax case on the site. The building qualified for the full deduction available at the time under Section 179D of the tax code, and on a 66,000 square foot building at $1.80 per square foot that is the $118,800 Guardian reports. Because the county owns the building and pays no federal tax, the deduction was allocated to the designer, which is the mechanism 179D provides for public projects.
Anyone reading this as a template should check the current rules rather than the numbers above. The Inflation Reduction Act rewrote 179D from 2023 onward, changing both the rate and the performance thresholds and tying the higher rates to prevailing-wage and apprenticeship requirements. The route is still open; the arithmetic is different.
Structurally this is a curtain wall, not a load-bearing one. Eight-inch panels at R-34 hang on steel moment-resisting frames, so the frame takes gravity and lateral load while the panel handles the envelope. That division is what lets a four-storey building have a continuous insulation layer with no structural penetrations through most of the wall area.
The programme explains why the envelope mattered. A county building housing the clerk, the sheriff, property valuation, E-911 and the judge-executive runs long hours across departments with very different occupancy patterns, and E-911 in particular never switches off.
