Soldier Piles Support Foundation at Highline

Burien - Addition DBM Contractors Inc. has completed excavation support for the Highline Medical Center Birch Wing Addition. The $900,000 shoring project required DBM to build a permanent retaining wall to allow for the building and site changes.

To complete the 343-foot-long permanent wall, DBM installed 41 soldier piles, 57 double corrosion protected tieback anchors, and 5,100 square feet of timber lagging. In addition, DBM installed 3,568 sq ft of temporary shoring for excavation support for the building expansion, which included installing 42 soldier piles and 48 tieback anchors as well as 42 underpinning piles to support the existing structure.

General Contractor/ Construction Manager for the project is GLY Construction. The Birch Wing project broke ground in July 2008 and is scheduled for completion in early 2010. When completed, the new facility will house a state-of-the-art Emergency Department, a Patient Care Unit, and space for future diagnostic imaging and lab services. Jim Elliott, Principal, and Tyler Tonkin, Sr. Project Manager, are leading the GLY project team.

Mayors Partner to Push Green School Construction

Washington, DC - Mayor Manny Diaz of Miami and Mayor Greg Nickels of Seattle announced the formation of the Mayors‘ Alliance for Green Schools, a coalition of mayors seeking to strategically harness the leadership and creativity of mayors across the country to promote the benefits of green schools in their communities.

Developed in partnership with the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), the Alliance will work to accelerate implementation of programs supporting the 2007 U.S.

University of Washington Professor Emeritus Dies

Seattle - Astra Zarina, a professor emeritus of architecture at the University of Washington, co-founder of the UW Italian Studies programs and co-founder of an institute on architecture and urban studies in Italy, died recently. She was 79.

"Astra was generous, brilliant, funny, open, opinionated, difficult, but above all, inspiring," said Jennifer Wilkin, her longtime assistant and now associate director of the UW Rome Center.

Zarina was born in Riga, Latvia, in 1929, and emigrated to the U.S. with her family after World War II. She graduated from the UW with an architecture degree in 1953, when there were few female architects, and later that year married fellow architect and UW graduate Douglas Haner.

Two years afterward, Zarina received a master‘s degree in architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and thereafter practiced professionally for a number of years. In 1960, she won the American Academy in Rome Fellowship in Architecture, the first woman to receive such an award. About the same time, she also won a Fulbright grant for study in Italy. In 1964, Zarina joined the UW faculty as a visiting lecturer.

Six years later, she and the UW Department of Architecture initiated the Architecture in Rome program. In 1984, after becoming a full professor, Zarina co-founded the UW‘s Rome Center with her second husband, and fellow architect, Anthony Costa Heywood. As part of renovating several floors of the historic Palazzo Pio as headquarters, Zarina helped discover and restore a medieval tower hidden for centuries behind walls of the palazzo.

Along with Heywood, she is survived by her sister, Vija Rekevics; her brothers, Uldis and Valdis Zarins; her nieces, Elizabette Grove and Carmen Gudz; and her nephew, Karlis Rekevics.

Historic Buildings to be Converted to Retail Use

Seattle – Melrose Project LLC has acquired two adjacent historic automotive buildings in the Pike-Pine neighborhood of Capitol Hill and plans to do a complete renovation to restaurant and retail use once the current tenant leaves at the end of January 2009.

The newly renovated facility will provide creative local restaurant and retail tenants an opportunity to serve their customers in a fully-upgraded historic property. Instead of tearing down the buildings and developing another cookie-cutter condo project, the developers have decided to keep the existing nearly century-old structures and renovate them to today’s standards of safety and functionality.

The developers’ success with similar projects has shown that both tenants and their customers appreciate these one-of-a-kind spaces, providing a look and feel not replicated in today’s modern buildings.

The project is comprised of two adjacent buildings that contain approximately 22,000 sq of rentable area ft. Dating from the early part of the 20th century, the buildings contain exposed brick walls, huge Douglas Fir beams, and ceiling heights that in some spaces exceed 22 feet. This acquisition and its planned redevelopment is a collaboration between local developers Liz Dunn of Dunn & Hobbes, LLC and Scott Shapiro of Eagle Rock Ventures LLC.