Project Name: Harlem Fire Watchtower

Company Name: Thornton Tomasetti

Project Location: New York City, New York United States

Project Information/Details: Thornton Tomasetti, the international engineering firm, has completed the restoration and reconstruction of the Harlem Fire Watchtower in Marcus Garvey Park, which was unveiled to the public by the New York City Parks Department on October 26th. It is a unique historic preservation project for one of America’s early cast iron structures. The Harlem Fire Watchtower was constructed in 1856 as one of a series of cast iron towers built throughout New York City designed to give firefighters a perch from which to watch over the community, and alert local fire companies by ringing a bell. When pull boxes rendered the fire watchtowers obsolete in the 1870’s, the system was discontinued, and the other towers eventually were torn down. Harlem residents rallied to protect the tower, which endured and is now the last remaining fire watchtower in the city. By the late 20th Century, the structure fell into disrepair and was near collapse. The structure, which is a NYC Landmark and listed on the National Register of Historic Places, was again saved by the activism of the Harlem Community, which inspired city officials to fund the restoration that also included adjacent landscaping and restoration of the WPA era plaza known as the Acropolis. Thornton Tomasetti was retained by the city for the tower’s first comprehensive restoration in more than 160 years. Thornton Tomasetti’s restoration design included structural assessment, historical documentation and a finite element analysis of the cast iron structure. Original cast iron elements underwent non-destructive testing (NDE) including magnetic particle inspection. Elements that were too deteriorated to be reused were replicated in new cast iron. The historic bell, dating from 1865, also underwent NDE that confirmed casting anomalies and micro cracking caused by impact. Because of its unusually large size, the 5,000-pound bell subsequently was shipped to the Netherlands for brazing to reconstitute its structure. Finite element analysis of the towers archaic structural system revealed that the structure had failed under wind loading so new interventions were required. To satisfy both structural and historic preservation goals, it was decided to reconstruct the tower as it originally stood but add a bracing system to make it structurally sufficient. The historic metals were painted the original color, while the supplemental elements were stainless steel. The modern elements were made as unobtrusive as possible and designed in a modern style to distinguish them from the historic fabric. Several lost features were recreated based on historical photos. The copper sheet metal roof was restored to its original dimensions. The landscape immediately around the tower was modified to recreate the original setting and provide ADA access. Security screens were created at the ground level that recall the original enclosure, while clearly being a modern intervention. Lightning protection was incorporated in the roof finial and concealed within the structure. In addition, Thornton Tomasetti assisted the NYC Department of Parks and Recreation with both Landmarks Preservation Commission and State Historic Preservation Office (SHPO) approvals on the restoration and design changes.

Project Name: Louisiana Children’s Museum

Company Name: New Millennium Building Systems

Project Location: New Orleans, Louisiana United States

Project Information/Details: Like countless others with modern-day New Orleans as a backdrop, the story of the Louisiana Children’s Museum changed forever when Hurricane Katrina struck the city on Aug. 29, 2005. Just a few weeks before that fateful summer day, the museum’s board of directors had approved a modest $2 million plan to remodel 1,500 square feet of the facility’s 30,000 square feet. That plan was swept aside when Katrina shuttered the museum. Simply surviving, yet alone expanding, became the museum’s priority. In the wake of the storm, the museum was closed for 10 months for cleanup. It wasn’t long after the museum’s reopening when plans for an entirely new facility began to take shape. Nearly 14 years to the day Katrina made landfall, the new Louisiana Children’s Museum in New Orleans City Park celebrated its grand opening Aug. 31, 2019. New Millennium Building Systems had reason to celebrate as well. The museum’s signature feature, a skewed, gabled metal roof, is made up of 1,075 panels of New Millennium Super Versa-Dek® 6.5 LS Acoustical architectural decking while the floor consists of Composite Floor Deck 3 Cellular Acoustical. Both systems contribute to the facility’s overall design concepts, among them mitigating noise in interior spaces and bringing the natural setting inside. The Vision The Louisiana Children’s Museum campus encompasses 8.5 acres of land in City Park, although the 56,400-square-foot museum sits on less than 1 acre overlooking a lagoon. The museum itself features two wings with a glass hallway connecting them, laid out in an H-shaped configuration. A 7,770-square-foot front porch greets visitors after they cross a bridge leading to the museum entrance. The covered porch looks over the lagoon and features exposed Super Versa-Dek® 6.5 LS Acoustical deck. Part of the Versa-Dek® family of architectural deck, Super Versa-Dek® has added depth that enhances the strength of the dovetail shape, providing clear spans up to 27 feet and overhang capabilities. The longest span required in this project, however, was 10 feet. “The long-span deck is an integral part of the architecture,” says Alex Therien, Market Development Manager at New Millennium. “It is an exposed design element.” Outside the facility, the museum features 47,000 square feet of exhibit space and numerous outdoor learning environments. The site’s many live oak trees necessitated the distinctive H-shaped layout of the building, which was designed by Seattle-based architecture firm Mithūn, supported locally by Waggonner & Ball. In addition, more than 125 new trees were planted to provide shade for families, homes for animals and areas for children to explore. “Mithūn and the Louisiana Children’s Museum’s design intent is to connect children to the natural environment,” Therien says. “It’s a connection to nature—a connection to water and culture. The building is literally connecting to the landscape.” Allison Stouse, the museum’s project director, explains further. “The whole project was really intended to be very transparent, very indoor-outdoor,” says Stouse, who holds a master’s degree in architecture. “There are a lot of very deliberate connections to views in the park. We’re in this beautiful park setting with these old majestic live oaks everywhere. There was a real intention to frame the outdoor views as well as a programmatic intention to connect children to nature.” “The building very much acts in that way.” Seeing It Through On May 20, 2017, museum construction began with a ceremonial groundbreaking. Soon after, New Millennium team members were working on the museum’s architectural roof deck and composite flooring system. Project detailing began in earnest in December 2017. The design of the building, as well as several external factors, presented New Millennium with several challenges. Skewed Metal Roof The museum’s distinctive roof features compound slopes angled two different ways, giving the facility an architectural flair or, as Stouse describes it, a “little bit of whimsy.” The end result is visually striking. To accomplish that was no easy task. The complex design required out-of-the-ordinary thinking during assembly and erection. “The roofing structure is all diagonal beams, diagonal to the outline of the building,” says Trent Fowler, Specialty Deck Project Manager at New Millennium. “Everything was on an angle, everything was on a skew, which meant each of the Super Versa-Dek® 6.5 sheet lengths and the air dam placement within these sheets was unique.” How monumental was that effort? In total, 1,075 sheets were delivered to the site between February and July 2018. “We had a detailing- and design-created list for every individual placement,” Fowler says. “Each sheet had to be placed exactly in the right spot.” That necessitated every panel of Super Versa-Dek® 6.5 to be hand-cut and individually assembled at the site to ensure they fit the angled roofline perfectly. Fabricari, the project’s erector, made all the cuts in the field. “The saw they used was enormous,” Fowler says. “It was the largest circular hand saw I’ve ever seen. They were cutting through two layers of this deck, and some of it already had acoustic batting installed.” Because the Super Versa-Dek® 6.5 side-lap connections were to be screwed into place, the deck features a topcoat applied in the field after placement to avoid damaging the finish. Childrens Museum Super-Versa Dek The museum’s Super Versa-Dek® 6.5 sheets were painted after being screwed into place so that the field-applied topcoat would not be damaged. Museum Quiet Areas A children’s museum is a noisy place, as anyone who’s visited one knows well. With more space, more exhibits and more visitors, the Louisiana Children’s Museum is no different, but the new facility is designed to mitigate ambient noise. The Super Versa-Dek® 6.5 LS Acoustical architectural decking features optional sound-absorbing elements that increase its Noise Reduction Coefficient (NRC). In this case, New Millennium provided both field- and factory-installed foam noise dams and acoustic batting inside of the deck to obtain “quiet areas,” Fowler says. The dams were used where the acoustic deck spanned walls from one area of the museum to another to prevent noise from traveling throughout the facility. “That detail was a challenge: To figure out how you acoustically differentiate spaces using the deck,” Stouse says. The acoustical roof deck achieved an NRC of 1.05. The composite floor that separates the two levels of exhibit space is equipped with acoustical elements in the deck cavities that enabled it to reach an NRC of .85. Temperature Control With average summer high temperatures topping 90 degrees in New Orleans, regulating the museum’s climate while achieving the design vision was critical. The exposed Super Versa-Dek® 6.5 LS Acoustical deck sheets extend indoors to outdoors, potentially allowing air to travel from inside to outside—and vice versa—through the roof deck’s perforations and deck channels. “You can’t stop perforations midspan,” Fowler says. “The acoustic decking extended beyond the wall to the outside of the deck, where those perforations had to be covered. There were air dams and plugs, some were factory-installed, some were field-installed, to block any air from the outside entering the building or any of the air-conditioned air from escaping the building.” In addition to the air dams inside the top and bottom flutes of the deck, the exterior deck’s perforations were blocked via a solid metal cover. Metal Cover to Prevent Air Escape To prevent air escaping or entering the museum, the exterior perforations on the exposed deck are blocked with a metal cover. Weather Delays Even by New Orleans standards, the amount of rain experienced during construction of the museum was voluminous. In one month it rained 22 days, and Therien says one soggy stretch featured 44 straight days of rain. “It’s hard to keep a project on time whenever you have that much rain. There were a lot of rainout days,” Fowler says. “It was quite a muddy mess.” “We had equipment disappearing in the mud like it was quicksand,” Stouse adds. “The contractors are to be completely commended for working through that. I don’t think I’ve seen anything like it.” To avoid adding to the mess during rainy periods, Fowler coordinated with the site’s deck erection superintendent to ensure only necessary materials were delivered. Project Behind Schedule The challenges and complexity of the project combined to knock construction off the target pace. New Millennium took several measures to ensure its part of the project recovered some of that lost time. At one point during roof erection, labor and hours were increased at the fabrication plant to expedite the schedule of assembly. At the job site, an extra deck installation crew was put in place. New Millennium–Memphis brought in additional crews to increase material output and supplied deck to the site to keep erection moving. Deliveries were coordinated with erection crews to enable them to work multiple areas at the same time. In addition, New Millennium also sent Super Versa-Dek® panels to the job site to be assembled concurrently with erection at the request of general contractor Roy Anderson Corp. and erector Woodward Design + Build. “New Millennium deck engineering approved the constructability of this method,” Fowler says. “New Millennium shipped the components and provided field assistance and inspections to ensure the deck was assembled in accordance to our guidelines.” Fowler, based in Columbia, S.C., also shepherded the project along with several site visits and everyday phone calls. “I did go to the job site quite a bit to work with Woodward Design + Build in their installation,” Fowler says. “I spoke with the foreman overseeing installation of the deck on a daily basis to get him what they needed. We were in constant communication.” The Lasting Image The Louisiana Children’s Museum is now one of the featured attractions in New Orleans City Park, a 1,300-acre outdoor oasis. Museum officials expect more than 225,000 visitors per year at the new location—10,000 visited during Labor Day weekend alone, Stouse says. The museum is specifically designed to be a social, cultural and early childhood learning resource. “With the building, what we wanted to do is say ‘children matter’ and that we, as a city and a state and a region, are putting children first,” Stouse explains. “So, we went bold. Very often, children’s museums are really scrapping together the resources to get anything off the ground, and we just said ‘No. This is really important.’ We feel like if we don’t put children first, then we are compromising our future. Children’s museums and institutions like ours can support not only the children and families who come to our institutions, but we can also support educators and we can collaborate with pediatric institutes to holistically create a positive ecosystem for the development of children. “We basically said we believe in the potential of children, and we’re going to show it in how we build for them and invest in them.” Being part of a project with such a noble mission is not lost on New Millennium. “Mithūn's overall concept to minute details are thoughtfully articulated,” Therien says. "It is an outstanding project, a community asset. We should be proud to have played our part."

Project Name: East End Transformation

Company Name: KieranTimberlake

Project Location: St. Louis, Missouri United States

Project Information/Details: Washington University in St. Louis will hold a dedication for the eight projects in its $360 million East End Transformation on October 2, 2019. Among the projects are two buildings for the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts (one of the top programs for art, architecture and design in the U.S.): the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum and Anabeth and John Weil Hall. The Kemper Art Museum opened its renovated and expanded facility on Saturday, September 28, with the major survey exhibition Ai Weiwei: Bare Life. The newly constructed Weil Hall houses state-of-the-art graduate studios, classrooms and digital fabrication spaces, and is already in active use by students. Designed by the internationally acclaimed architecture firm KieranTimberlake, both projects are part of the East End Transformation of Washington University’s Danforth Campus. Master planning for the East End was led by landscape architect Michael Vergason. “This is the dawn of a new era for Washington University and the Sam Fox School,” says Carmon Colangelo, the Ralph J. Nagel Dean and E. Desmond Lee Professor for Collaboration in the Arts at the Sam Fox School. “Weil Hall and the expanded Kemper Art Museum demonstrate the important role that art, architecture and design education play within a top-tier private research university.” All new buildings on the East End of Washington University have been designed to achieve LEED-Gold certification, and many include solar photovoltaic arrays located on the roofs to generate renewable electricity. High-efficiency heat recovery chillers will harvest waste heat for much of the heating needs, and an underground garage capped with a green roof creates a new space—the Ann and Andrew Tisch Park. The park’s landscape design features rain gardens with bio-retention, native plantings and a diverse tree canopy. Low-carbon transportation will be encouraged with a new bike commuter facility, which includes showers and lockers, electric vehicle charging stations, and a network of bicycle and pedestrian pathways to link campus to Forest Park and regional greenways. Expanded Kemper Art Museum: Wider Reach, Deeper Engagement A striking new 34-foot-tall polished stainless-steel facade draws visitors to the expanded Kemper Art Museum. The building’s pleated surface reflects the dynamic movement of campus and sky while sparking curiosity and inviting interaction. It sets the stage for both the outstanding collection and the thought-provoking exhibitions to be experienced within. Entering the museum, visitors encounter a soaring new glass-lined lobby, featuring a stunning new commission by Argentine artist Tomás Saraceno. The new 2,700-square-foot James M. Kemper Gallery, with its double-height walls, showcases a range of postwar and contemporary art from the museum’s collection. In all, When lower level galleries open in 2020, the museum’s total public display space will have increased by nearly 50 percent. As a teaching museum, the Kemper Art Museum serves as a center of cultural and intellectual life on Washington University’s campus and in the larger community. Dating back to 1881, the museum’s collection is especially strong in the areas of 19th- and 20th-century European and American art as well as international art of the 21st century. The museum reopened September 28 with Ai Weiwei: Bare Life, a thematic exhibition that offers new insight into the celebrated Chinese artist’s work on human rights and his deep engagement with China’s past. On view through January 5, 2020, the exhibition features some 39 artworks created in a wide variety of media over the last two decades. Highlights include the brand-new wallpaper installation Bombs, created for this exhibition, as well as important works never before exhibited in the United States. Weil Hall: Community and Dialogue Weil Hall, with its abundant natural light and flexible, loft-style studios and workspaces, is a new locus for teaching, study, creation and critique. The building allows, for the first time in decades, all of the schools graduate and undergraduate art, architecture, and design programs to be located together at the front door to campus. The luminous, two-story Kuehner Court features a living green wall, skylights and glass walls that allow for visual connectivity between studio spaces, providing students with a feeling of simultaneity and participation in a larger community. Other noteworthy spaces include the Caleres Fabrication Studio, where students and faculty across programs can execute complex projects using state-of-the-art tools, and Weil Hall Commons, which has a commissioned mural wall that will feature new works by alumni each year. KieranTimberlake designed Weil Hall’s sleek glass exterior to create a rich dialogue with the color, form and proportions of all five preexisting buildings for the Sam Fox School. An elegant facade of opaque and translucent glass with vertical aluminum fins affords generous natural light throughout the interior and access to striking campus views while minimizing solar gain and glare inside the building. Weil Hall joins the Sam Fox School’s stately, Beaux Arts-era Bixby (1926) and Givens (1932) Halls; the modernist pavilion Steinberg Hall (1960); and the limestone-clad Walker Hall and Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum (both 2006). The latter three were designed by Pritzker Prize winner Fumihiko Maki, a former member of the architecture faculty. Florence Steinberg Weil Sculpture Garden The Florence Steinberg Weil Sculpture Garden—designed by Michael Vergason Landscape Architects—extends the museum’s reach into the surrounding park. Situated along a primary pedestrian walkway, the sculpture garden features iconic works such as Auguste Rodin’s The Shade and Alexander Calder’s Five Rudders as well as a new commission by contemporary artist Dan Graham. About the East End Transformation The $360 million transformation of Washington University’s East End encompasses eight major components. These include Weil Hall and the Kemper Art Museum, as well as the Gary M. Sumers Welcome Center and the Craig and Nancy Schnuck Pavilion, all designed by KieranTimberlake in partnership with Tao + Lee; an underground parking garage, designed by KieranTimberlake and BNIM; and Ann and Andrew Tisch Park, an expansive green space designed by Michael Vergason Landscape Architects. Two new buildings for the university’s McKelvey School of Engineering will round out the East End: Henry A. and Elvira H. Jubel Hall, designed by Moore Ruble Yudell and Mackey Mitchell; and James M. McKelvey, Sr. Hall which will be completed in 2020, designed by Perkins Eastman with patterhn ives, LLC. McCarthy Building Companies and the Simms Building Group serve as construction managers. About KieranTimberlake KieranTimberlake is an internationally acclaimed architecture firm with a portfolio of beautifully crafted, thoughtfully made buildings that are holistically integrated to site, program and people. Founded in 1984, the 100- person practice is recognized worldwide with prestigious design awards, publications and exhibitions. The firm’s transdisciplinary approach integrates the expertise of architects, researchers and communicators to create innovative, compelling and award-winning projects for academic, art, cultural, government, and civic institutions throughout North America and overseas. About Washington University in St. Louis Washington University in St. Louis is a medium-sized, independent university dedicated to challenging its faculty and students alike to seek new knowledge and greater understanding of an ever-changing, multicultural world. The university is counted among the world’s leaders in teaching and research, and draws students from all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Guam, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. Students and faculty come from more than 100 countries around the world. The university offers more than 90 programs and almost 1,500 courses leading to bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees in a broad spectrum of traditional and interdisciplinary fields, with additional opportunities for minor concentrations and individualized programs.