Part 1: Too Valuable to Demolish, Too Expensive to Retrofit

In 2012, the Alameda Unified School District in Alameda, California, made the difficult decision to fence off and vacate all three historic classroom buildings on the Historic Alameda High School (HAHS) campus due to seismic safety deficiencies. These buildings and the attached auditorium, lobby, gym, and locker room buildings had stood since 1924. However, the classroom buildings lacked approval under California’s Field & Garrison Acts, putting the school district at legal risk (and any building occupants at life safety risk). The long process to rehabilitate and restore these nearly century-old buildings had entered its final chapter.

Connecting Old and New

In response to growth in the region, the vision for Slover Library in Norfolk, Virginia, was a state-of-the-art public space that would serve the 21^st century needs of the community and learners of all ages. The challenge: renovating a 115-year-old historic building, renovating a mid-century commercial building, and connecting the two with a new, modern addition. The result is the 135,000-square-foot Slover Library complex that redefines how a public library is used.

The Oscar Johnson Jr. Community Center in Conroe, Texas, will begin construction in 2022. The project’s architecture firm is Burditt Consultants and the structural engineering firm is DUDLEY. The building will utilize mass timber construction and is intended to be an architectural statement for the community. Its 120,000 square feet of public space strives to affect countless lives for more than one hundred years. To fulfill that goal, however, the building needs to stand the test of time. There are many factors and environmental loads at play, but perhaps the most daunting is expansive soils. DUDLEY’s solution is building the Community Center’s foundation using a suspended hollow core plank slab system supported by elevated concrete beams constructed on top of belled piers. The system is designed to decouple as much of the structure as possible from expansive soil movements while saving overall foundation cost and construction time. It also allows for ease of future modification/repair for plumbing and mechanical systems, given that there is direct access to the crawl space.

Pig Patch House is a single-family custom house located in England. It is built from mass timber panels used in the walls, upper floor, and roofs, suspended insulated precast concrete floor planks at ground floor level, and RC ground beams on mini concrete piles used as foundations.

Part 4: Structural Investigations

This four-part series discusses the adaptive reuse of the Witherspoon Building in Philadelphia, PA (Part 1, STRUCTURE, September 2021, Part 2, October 2021, Part 3, November 2021). Part 4 continues the discussion of the structural investigations, including the Gray columns, new floor openings, and demolition of the second-floor mezzanine to allow for a new second-floor loft. Numbered photos are provided in the print version of the articles; lettered photos are provided only within the online versions of the articles.

The Transportation Center at Pima Community College’s Center of Excellence for Applied Technology is 43,000 square feet with a total of 27 work bays, including spaces for testing and diagnosis of electric vehicles, faculty offices, classrooms, a dynamometer room, equipment storage, and a large public entry. The unique utility of the building governed its placement, such as the clearance necessary for cars to drive around the lobby and into the work bays. In addition, the structural design focuses on responding to flexibility and visibility, resulting in a state-of-the-art, hands-on learning environment reflected in the vast amount of exposed steel. A high degree of coordination and unique framing concepts, which the team termed “structural gymnastics,” led to the project’s success. DLR Group provided planning, architecture, structural engineering, electrical engineering, interiors, and construction administration services for the Transportation Center.

Kaiser Permanente Brings Needed Medical Services and Creative Architecture to Its West Berkeley Neighborhood

The new Kaiser Permanente (KP) medical office building (MOB) in West Berkeley will provide critical medical services to the local community. The L-shaped 66,000-square-foot structure embraces the challenging small infill site with an integrated design that allows for open floor plates and a stunning architectural design. After studying different structural schemes, the ConXtech steel space moment frame was chosen as the structural solution to maximize the flexibility of the ground floor parking and embrace the architectural expression. The steel moment frame scheme allowed for improved seismic performance and allowed for shallow foundations.

Williams College Science Renewal Project

With tremendous growth in the sciences and the need for new research, teaching, and equipment space, Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, sought to expand its existing science center to serve the educational demands of the science departments and their students. Nestled within the Berkshire mountains, the original campus buildings are modestly scaled pavilions set in the landscape and define a network of courtyards and outdoor spaces. While recent mega-building clusters were added to the campus, the college favored adding two modestly scaled buildings more in keeping with the original campus fabric over creating another singular megastructure. The buildings could still physically connect to the existing science center via bridge connections but would frame and shape the interconnected landscape that forms the spirit of the campus.

Part 3: Structural Investigations

This four-part series discusses the adaptive reuse of the Witherspoon Building in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (Part 1, STRUCTURE, September 2021, Part 2, October 2021). Part 3 continues the discussion of the structural investigations – specifically the main roof and original mechanical penthouse – conducted to understand the existing structure better. Numbered photos are provided in the print version of the articles; lettered photos are provided only within the online versions of the articles.

The new 95 State office and mixed-use facility consists of a 25-story Class A tower with a 5-story podium ecclesiastical meeting house totaling 640,740 square feet. The building is located in the heart of downtown Salt Lake City, Utah. The project is being developed by City Creek Reserve Inc. with Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, architect and structural engineer, and Okland Construction as the general contractor. It is scheduled for completion in late 2021. The integrated urban design of multiple project components includes a complete rehab of the interconnecting pavilion and tunnel under State Street, connects 95 State to Salt Lake’s City Creek Center, and provides connections to neighboring Harmons retail and parking with a new solar canopy. With a client and owner team interested in the long-term performance of the facility located in a region of high seismicity and close to an active segment of Utah’s Wasatch Fault zone, SOM’s structural engineering design team responded to the design challenges of the new 392-foot-tall tower constrained on a narrow corner site using state-of-the-art performance-based seismic design methodologies and standards. Figure 1 shows 95 State from the south nearing completion.