Artful Construction

Museum Projects are Unique Tasks for Local Designers and Contractors

By Kathy Leotta and John Wolcott

Howard S. Wright Seattle, is pouring the walls and foundation at the National Flight Interpretive Center in Evertt. (Photo courtesy of Howard S. Wright)

Museums have heavily traveled spaces that inspire and educate, and they also must protect their sensitive artifacts.

That dual responsibility makes the task of creating museums a tough one for designers and contractors.

"Unlike most other buildings, museums contain artifacts that are sensitive to light, temperature and humidity," said Chris Linn, an associate principal at BOORA Architects Inc. in Portland. "So they bring with them very specific requirements, such as avoiding temperature and humidity fluctuations."

Museums also attract many visitors, which means flooring and other materials have to be durable, but they also need to be humane. "I look for materials that are warm, have depth and variation."

Linn frequently specifies end-grain wood flooring in museums. According to Linn, Oregon Lumber Co. is one of the leading manufacturers of end-grain wood flooring in the United States. "It is essentially wood blocks that have the grain oriented vertically, so that you see the ends of the grain when looking at the floor," Museums also require extraordinarily flexible designs. The lights and walls in galleries, for instance, have to be easily transformed to support a museum's frequent change in exhibits.

Northwest Firms Involved Nationally

Northwest designers are familiar with the inherent complexities in designing museums. BOORA Architects Inc. for example, served as the design consultant for the Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati.

The barn at the Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati comes from Kentucky and was reconstructed on site. Inside is a pen where slaves were kept prior to sale. (Photo courtesy of BOORA)

Like many other museum projects, the Freedom Center job included a passionately interested group of constituents who sometimes had divergent ideas. "The key is listening and being respectful," Linn said. "But the best thing of all is to have a great idea, present it well and have some conviction about it."

Jones & Jones in Seattle is another Northwest firm that has helped design a national museum. It served as one of the project architects for the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.

The designers incorporated suggestions from Native Americans throughout North, Central and South America, and Jones & Jones' own Johnpaul Jones, who is of Cherokee/Choctaw heritage, was one of the designers.

Closer to home, three art museum projects are presenting designers and contractors with unique design and construction dilemmas.

Seattle Art Museum Partners with Washington Mutual

The Seattle Art Museum (SAM) is expanding in a big way, tripling its available space and accomplishing it decades sooner than anyone anticipated.

When SAM built its original museum in 1991, it also purchased a gutted brick building on the same block, anticipating future expansion needs. "The original plan was to build a stand-alone museum in that space, but it would've taken the museum 20 to 30 years to afford it," said Cara Egan, SAM's manager of communications.

Then along came Washington Mutual, which was looking for property in downtown Seattle for a new office building. Washington Mutual approached SAM about a joint development on SAM's vacant site. "It was an opportunity to expand the museum earlier than we anticipated, and we figured out that the gradual expansion of the museum could work," Egan added.

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Washington Mutual purchased the downtown parcel and a nearby garage from SAM and the Museum Development Authority (MDA) for $27.7 million, which went toward SAM's capital costs on the project. The total cost of the museum expansion and increased endowment comes to $86 million.

The new development will consist of two separate buildings - a 16-story museum building on First Avenue and a 42-story Washington Mutual tower behind it on Second Avenue. Twelve floors of the museum building will provide expansion space for the museum, while the top four floors will provide additional permanent office space for Washington Mutual.

SAM will initially occupy the lower four levels when the museum expansion is completed in early 2007 and lease eight floors to Washington Mutual until the museum needs the additional space.

"The challenging part is creating a space that can serve as both a museum space in the future and bank space in the near term," said Scott Redman, executive vice president of Sellen Construction Co. out of Seattle, the general contractor on the project. "How do you make it work as a bank space on day one, but ultimately it has to have all the more complex mechanical and climate control, security and fire protection systems that you'd typically see in a museum."

Part of the solution has been designing one building that can serve both uses. For instance, in some areas the floor loading capacity accommodates the museum's future needs although it exceeds the capacity required by the bank in the near-term. Some floor areas that the bank will occupy in the near-term will later be removed to create two-story museum gallery spaces. Similarly, the designers have found creative solutions for the building's mechanical and electrical systems, such as incorporating extra space to accommodate the museum's more robust mechanical requirements.

"The team has done a great job of creating spaces that can work for both owners," said Redman. "And they've done so in a way that minimizes the cost to transition the space from the bank's use to the museum's use in the future."

Construction on the museum expansion began in February, 2004. The general contractor expects to place columns and beams as quickly as two floors per week.

Portland Art Museum

The Portland Art Museum also strives to create special spaces for its patrons and is creating a new one through the renovation and restoration of a historic building. The museum's North Building, which was acquired by the museum in 1991, was formerly a Masonic Temple originally built in 1925. The cost of renovating the North Building is estimated at $31.5 million.

The Portland Art Museum is primarily a renovation project with Hoffman Construction as the general contractor.

The building will include entirely new mechanical and electrical systems. "We're taking a building heated previously by hot water and introducing new heating and cooling systems, all new electrical switch gears, all new lighting and all new fire alarm and safety features," said Eric H.I. Hoffman, operations manager at Hoffman Construction Co., the general contractor on the project.

The North Building consists of the center section, the north wing and the south wing.

"The center section, which will include a renovated ballroom and library, is pure restoration," said Hoffman. "The building's original finishes, which are much more ornate than typically seen today, were all done with plaster. So we've had to find capable craftspeople to match those older styles of construction."

The south wing is being converted to new gallery space, while the north wing will provide administrative offices. Historic renovations on these two sections include removing all floors and room structures while maintaining the sides of the building.

The building renovation will include one additional floor in both wings, as well as a new basement in the south wing. "The kicker on the south is not only saving the exterior walls," said Hoffman, "but building the basement underneath."

According to Adam Bonner, Project Superintendent at Hoffman Construction Co., this effort required two significant shoring efforts.

First the contractor shored the building to allow for excavation of the new basement. The basement was shored through an engineered shoring system with a series of soldier piles and tiebacks. Once the lagging reached the lowest elevation, the contractor poured new footings, tied rebar in front of the lagging, and shot a thick shotcrete retaining wall.

A second shoring effort was required to support the exterior walls until the new structure was installed. "This was the most technically challenging part of the entire project," said Bonner.

First the contractors cut a slot around the perimeter of all floors and placed new shotcrete walls through this slot. The team then removed the floor slabs but retained the existing steel beams that supported the old floors. The concrete was stripped off of the existing steel beams and every other beam was removed.

The contractor then installed new beams by grinding down the existing beam connection points and installing new beams in these locations. The old beams that had not yet been replaced were then removed and replaced with new beams in the same manner.

These shoring efforts required extraordinary care by the entire team to ensure that the building did not collapse. "All demolition workers, concrete workers, and structural steel workers had to be crystal clear on each step to make sure the building stability was not compromised," said Bonner.

Construction began in February 2004 and should be complete at the end of the summer. Key subcontractors on the project include Degenkolb Engineers, Elder Demolition, Northwest Cascade, Fabrication Products Inc, R2M2 Rebar & Stressing, Inc., and Johnson Western Gunite Company.

National Flight Intrepretive Center

Lead architect Wyn Bielaska of Callison Architecture in Seattle had quite a task in designing the multifunction Future of Flight Aviation Center and Boeing Tour facility at Paine Field.

Building systems in the Seattle Art museum expansion were designed for flexibility. (Rendering courtesy of NBBJ)

The project's 10-acre site was no easy flight, either.

Bielaska chose an innovative approach that not only blended the building's diverse purposes - an aviation exhibit gallery, a conference center, two gift shops, a 200-seat theater, a tour facility and offices - but also emphasized the low green hills and scenic vistas around the site.

He oriented the 63,000-sq.-ft. building on a sloping hillside between a highway and the airfield's runway in a way that offered the best views of the nearby Boeing 747, 767, 777 and 7E7 assembly plant; the airport; Mount Baker; and Mount Rainier.

"The design of the building was primarily driven by the site," the architect said. "The Museum of Flight at Boeing Field in Seattle is in a sea of concrete. Paine Field in Everett has rolling hills and mountain scenery. I wanted to frame the building with the landscape and frame (views of) the landscape from the building."

To eliminate retention ponds that would attract birds near the runway, Bielaska worked with Erickson Landscape and Urban Design of Seattle to use two innovative new products, GrassPave and Rainstore. Together they dramatically reduce the amount of necessary excavation, soil transporting, installation time and labor that would have been required for retention ponds.

GrassPave uses open-ended plastic tubes buried a few inches below the ground surface to catch water that would otherwise flow off the site. Planting grass in the tubes allows water to collect naturally, with improved drainage, and produces a green surface. The tubes provide enough support to hold together under the weight of vehicles.

"We'll use GrassPave for the aviation center's parking areas instead of five acres of asphalt pavement," said Bill Lewallen, the Snohomish County Airport's deputy director for property management.

Similarly, Rainstore fills a large, excavated, underground "retention pond" with recycled plastic formed into sets of vertical tubes that capture and channel stormwater into the storage space.

"Snohomish County is testing these two environmental projects to evaluate how well they handle water runoff," Lewallen said. "Rainstore will enable us to substitute underground storage for a surface-level retention pond."

Visitors will walk between earth berms and past a historic 737 tri-jet airliner as they enter the aviation center's lobby at the north end of Beilaska's "square tube" hallway that stretches from the lobby entrance to the Plaza of Planes, a 102- by 268-ft. clear-span exhibit space.

At the south end of the corridor, he designed a deeply inset window that frames the nose and cockpit of a giant 747 airliner parked outside of the building.

"It will look much like the views of airliners you see through an airport terminal window, but without any distracting elements around it," Beilaska said. Looking back through the hallway toward the lobby, that end of the "tube" frames a view of Mount Baker and Cascade mountain scenery.

On the east side of the facility, paralleled by the Paine Field runway, is the Boeing Tour Center, designed with bus and vehicle parking, a gift shop and a 200-seat theater for films shown prior to tours of the Boeing airliner assembly plant. The café windows face west, overlooking the 727 exhibit and the multiroom convention center facilities on the west side of the Plaza of Planes gallery.

Due to open in late August, the $22 million venture was initially launched as the National Flight Interpretive Center. The facility was renamed in December to more accurately reflect its unique role among Pacific Northwest air museums.

Offering only a tip-of-the-hat to the past - represented in the 747 and 727 Boeing aircraft displayed outside and a few of the inside exhibits - the Future of Flight center is designed to focus on present and future developments in airliner manufacturing and technology.