The Changing Face of Seattle
Art & Aquarium Renassance
Two large-scale entertainment projects transform the Emerald City waterfront
by Sheila Bacon
Artist Alexander Calder’s Eagle is one of more than 20 installations at the Seattle Art Museum’s new Olympic Sculpture Park.
Photo courtesy of Paul Warchol
The January grand opening of Seattle’s Olympic Sculpture Park capped an eight-year effort to transform what was the largest remaining tract of undeveloped waterfront in the city.
The six-acre public park that emerged from the once-contaminated petroleum tank farm features 21 displays of outdoor art, unparalleled views of Puget Sound and Mount Rainier and public access to the Seattle waterfront, which is becoming increasingly scarce.
The $85-million Olympic Sculpture Park is only the most recent of a number of large-scale construction projects under way or on the books in the Emerald City, and the first of two major Seattle Art Museum building projects to be completed in 2007. The second, an expanded downtown museum, is scheduled to open May 5.
In early 2006, an associated project, Washington Mutual’s WaMu Tower, was completed. It abuts the under-renovation museum and offers a an unusual space-sharing arrangement between the museum and the bank (see Constructor, Nov./Dec. 2005).
The museum partnered with San Francisco-based Trust for Public Land to raise funds for the 1998 purchase of the former brownfield site from Union Oil of California. Additional funds came from grants from the federal government, King County and the city of Seattle. Former Microsoft President Jon Shirley and his wife, Mary, donated a number of the sculptures and $20 million to endow the park’s operations, a contribution that is the key element in enabling the park to be free to the public.
Built by AGC of Washington member-firm Sellen Construction, based in Seattle, and designed by New York City-based Weiss/ Manfredi Architecture/Landscape/Urbanism, the sculpture park is actually three parcels of land joined by two landscaped bridges built over a major roadway and busy railroad tracks. The design zigzags from a split-level pavilion at the top of the park down to Elliott Bay.
The Z-shaped pathway slowly reveals artwork and views of nature along the way to the bay, says Weiss/Manfredi partner Marion Weiss.
The park’s construction was anything but easy. Contractors had to span a busy railroad track, coordinate trades, install utilities between layers of fill and optimize a schedule around a month-long concrete strike that occurred at the peak of construction. “It was quite an orchestration to make sure everyone had the ability to work productively,” says Bill Badger, Sellen’s senior project manager.
About half of the site’s approximately 200,000 yd of general fill material was brought in from SAM’s expansion project nearby, with as many as eight trucks moving material to the site at the peak of infill. The dense dirt required to cap the contaminated ground below turned thick and muddy when wet weather arrived. Sitework crews from AGC member-firm Northwest Construction Inc. had to create complex temporary roadways within the site to facilitate vehicle and material movement. Building the bridge across the busy Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroad tracks that run beneath the park was one of the trickier tasks the team had to perform, Badger says.
An estimated 40 trains passing through the site each day required the oversight of a full-time flagger and painstaking coordination of support-wall and deck construction. To erect the deck’s steel beams, crews had to squeeze the work into two-hour-long windows of time over two consecutive weekend nights.
The project team’s schedule was severely impacted last summer when a King County concrete workers’ strike curtailed the project for nearly all of August. “It was tough to lose a summer month,” Badger says. “We had accelerated some site activities (in the weeks preceding the anticipated strike), but it did leave us in an environment in which we had to abandon work as the strike went on.”
Crews picked up the pace in September when the strike ended, but the delays still caused the park to open three months later than its originally scheduled October 2006 completion date.
Aquarium Updrade
A 55,000-lb acrylic window, part of the “Window on Washington Waters” exhibit, was lowered through a roof opening, then moved into position.
Photos by Heather Allie Saunders/ Seattle Aquarium Socirty
Just south of the Olympic Sculpture Park along Seattle’s waterfront, the Seattle Aquarium is receiving a $41-million face-lift. The Seattle office of AGC member-firm Turner Construction completed the first phase of construction last fall with a remodel of the 100-year-old pier on which the aquarium sits.
Work included replacement of approximately 1,000 piles in various stages of decay, as well as the installation of new concrete aprons to replace the existing wooden aprons. The initial phase also included the removal of the building’s front façade and the demolition of the former east end of the building.
The project’s second phase, currently in progress, involves an interior renovation of the aquarium with two new exhibits: the 120,000-gallon “Window on Washington Waters” and a small wave tank that runs 40 ft along a hallway and serves as a transition to the existing tide-pool exhibit. All phases of work have been performed while the aquarium remains open to the public.
“When we had our first conversations with the contractors and the engineers, the initial feedback we got was that it would be easier to construct if we simply closed the aquarium,” says Robert Davidson, CEO of the Seattle Aquarium Society.
But closing was not an option. The aquarium had just experienced record-breaking attendance in 2005 when 700,000 visitors walked through its door. The aquarium’s leaders were eager to build upon that success. Davidson says that with astute scheduling and coordination, 2006 attendance numbers remained within 4% of the previous year, despite the building activity.
The biggest task of the recent interior work has been the acquisition and installation of a 55,000-lb acrylic window, a main component of the “Window on Washington Waters” exhibit, says Joy Okazaki, senior project manager with Turner Special Projects.
The 38-ft-long, 16-ft-wide, 12.5-in.-thick window was shipped in one piece from Grand Junction, Colo., requiring city street-use and closure permits as it made its way to the jobsite. It was lowered into the aquarium through an opening in the structure’s roof left specifically for that purpose, Okazaki says. Once the window was lowered, it required considerable handling to move it into its final canted position.
Okazaki adds that the big lift followed a monolithic, 31-hour concrete pour for the 20-ft-high walls of the exhibit’s tank, performed in one continuous step using slip forming to avoid potential leaks through joints or seams. Sixteen loads of concrete were pumped in through the roof opening.
Construction of the exhibits and associated tenant improvement work is scheduled for completion in May, with the new exhibits opening to the public in June.
REPLACING THE ALASKAN WAY VIADUCT While the light-rail line is on track, another one of Seattle’s big-ticket transportation projects is still in the painful, early stages of development.
The Alaskan Way Viaduct is an elevated portion of Highway 99 that carries vehicles past downtown Seattle along the waterfront. It was damaged in the 2001 Nisqually earthquake, although it still remains in full use. The structure carries 110,000 cars each day and is one of just two major north-south thoroughfares in the city. The other is Interstate 5.
Since the quake, the repair or replacement of the 54-year-old, two-deck roadway has been the focus of debate. Options range from construction of a new $3.4-billion surface/tunnel hybrid to a $2.8-billion elevated replacement structure. Repairing the existing structure or demolishing the viaduct and rerouting traffic to downtown city streets have also been discussed. Faced with both choices in an unusual, dual-option ballot March 13, Seattle residents turned down both the new elevated roadway and a new tunnel. It’s back to the drawing board for city and state lawmakers. The Seattle AGC office’s official position on the viaduct project is one of neutrality, says Jerry Dinsdorf, AGC’s Seattle district manager. “We support an improved connection, whatever it is,” he says.
SEATTLE LIGHT-RAIL WILL MOVE ON VIADUCTS
AND THROUGH TUNNELS TO SEATC AIRPORT Along with parts of its skyline, Seattle’s infrastructure system is being transformed. The first portion of Sound Transit’s Link Light Rail project is currently under way, with the initial 14-mile, $2.4-billion segment scheduled for completion in July 2009.
Trains will run south from downtown Seattle, stopping at 12 stations along the way. The cars will operate on a system that includes 4.4 miles of elevated tracks, 2.5 miles of tunnels and 7 miles track at grade. Soon to follow, in December 2009, will be the completion of a 1.7-mile “airport link” segment that will run directly to Seattle-Tacoma International Airport.
These two southern-end segments are part of a grander regional plan that, by 2030, will potentially stretch south from Seattle’s Northgate neighborhood, past the University of Washington and the Capitol Hill neighborhood, through the city’s Central District, to the airport and beyond. Designs are currently in the works to extend the system north.
The project is being funded by a combination of local voter-approved taxes, federal grants, bonds and, once operations begin, fares from riders.
AGC member-firm PCL Construction’s Bellevue, Wash., office is one of several general contractors working on the initial segment. The firm is building a 6-mile, $270-million section from south Seattle to just north of Sea-Tac International Airport. PCL’s work is expected to be complete by February 2008.
Other AGC members working on the initial segment are London-based Balfour Beatty’s Kent, Wash., office; Kiewit Pacific of Vancouver, Wash.; and Mowat Construction Co. of Woodinville, Wash.
Five miles of PCL’s contract involve construction of the elevated guideway, as well as a number of major roadway crossings, says Chris Stack, PCL’s senior project manager. Crews finished the 350-ft-long Duwamish River crossing last summer and completed the 268-ft-long span across Interstate 5 in February. Additional rail spans over other major roadways are planned for this summer and fall.
The bridge design is precast segmental construction, a method used frequently in the South but unique to Washington state. Sections are cast in eastern Washington, then delivered to the jobsite and assembled.
“Crews can build the foundations while the superstructure is being built somewhere else,” Stack says. “It’s a fast form of construction.”
Crews are using two erection techniques: span-by-span configuration with an overhead erection gantry or falsework, as well as a balanced cantilever configuration utilizing conventional cranes.
Cost noticeable along the elevated portion of the construction route is the massive overhead erection gantry, which features two steel trusses sitting on transverse beams. These beams are supported in the rear by the deck of the previously erected span and in the front by the forward half of the column of the span being erected. Hoisting devices are two 80-ton winches that traverse longitudinally on top of the truss elements
BOOMING IN BELLVUE Just across Lake Washington, the city of Bellevue is finding itself in the midst of a surging commercial real estate market, one that in recent months has pushed office vacancy rates down into the single digits. That is quite a change from 2004, when office vacancy rates reached 30%.
The increased activity has prompted a spate of office-tower construction. Office projects planned or started in downtown Bellevue include: > Lincoln Square’s North Tower. Part of a 1.4-million-sq-ft office, retail and residential project, the office-tower portion is currently under construction. Microsoft is leasing 320,000 sq ft of space, and Eddie Bauer has committed to 220,000 sq ft. > The Bravern. Construction is under way on a two-tower office and retail venture, bringing 745,000 sq ft of office space and 745,000 sq ft of retail to NE Eighth Street near Bellevue's convention center. > The Summit. Phase III of this complex is a 300,000-sq-ft office tower. > City Center Plaza. This 26-story tower offers 571,000 sq ft of office space.
> Tower 333. On the long-dormant site of a failed technology tower, the new project is a 20-story, 400,000-sq-ft office tower.
