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Sprint Center Shines Crystal Clear Transparent Sprint Center highlights new face of downtown Kansas City By Jennifer Seward
With more than $4.5 billion of construction projects reshaping its skyline, Kansas City’s downtown district is undergoing a much-needed revitalization to re-create its image as an entertainment destination. At the center of the rebirth sits the bedazzling new Sprint Center, an eye-popping jewel in Kansas City’s newly polished crown. Designed as a see-through building, the $276-million sports and entertainment venue is intended to be viewed from the inside out. Variable glass panes create a completely transparent skin, offering 360-degree views of the city and an ever-changing reflection of the sky, traffic, neighboring buildings and the Power and Light entertainment district planned just west of the arena, says design architect Brad Clark of the Downtown Arena Design Team.
Opened in October, the 18,000-seat venue is situated on 8.5 acres and will accommodate its own NBA and NHL teams as well as other sporting events, concerts and family shows. The arena also serves as headquarters of the National Association of Basketball Coaches and exhibit space for the National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame and College Basketball Experience, an interactive fan area featuring hands-on exhibits that place visitors in game-like situations. The arena is a public/private partnership between Kansas City and Los Angeles-based AEG, a world leader in entertainment and sporting ventures including the Staples Center in Los Angeles and London’s new arena, The O2. “A lot of people in the region probably had not been to downtown Kansas City in years because there was nothing compelling or unique to bring them here,” says Brenda Tinnen, the Sprint Center’s senior vice president and general manager. K.C. Masterpiece Located on the edge of the newly developed Power and Light entertainment district, the Sprint Center is the cornerstone of the city’s revitalization efforts and the culmination of the grand vision of former Kansas City Mayor Kay Barnes (D). “We want to provide entertainment for folks from three to 93,” Tinnen says.
To accomplish this, four of the city’s prominent sports design firms 360 Architecture, Ellerbe Becket, HOK Sport and Rafael Architects collaborated to form a consortium calling themselves the Downtown Arena Design Team. The four firms took the strengths of each office and combined them to create a world-class design, says project manager Mike Clay. The four firms collectively have designed and built 114 arenas worldwide, including 32 NBA and/or NHL facilities. “The smartest thing we did was to establish a project office and work as a team,” says Clay. He says the DADT team created an iconic design that will forever be immediately identifiable as the Sprint Center.
DADT designer Brad Schrock says the inspiration for the see-through design came from the “belief this building should represent Kansas City’s honesty, clarity, vision and the Midwestern values we all cherish.” Basically, the design team wanted the building to express itself in a straightforward way, says project architect Steve Allison. “The transparency of the glass allows everyone to see inside and see what’s there; [the building] is what you see it to be,” Allison says. Color and Light The mechanics of installing the imposing glass curtain wall entailed a year-long process in which 2,204 glass panels averaging 700 lb were wrapped around the building to form an elliptical crystal bowl. The panels were manufactured in China, where the project’s general contractor Mortenson Construction, Minneapolis, has an office. Sunrises and sunsets are reflected in the glass, designed with a mixture of clear and fritted panels to cut down on the solar heat gain, says Mike Cunningham, CEO of Architectural Wall Systems, Des Moines, the project’s glass installer. “The owners and designers made a tour of other outstanding arenas and borrowed the best elements in designing the Sprint Center,” says Mortenson construction executive Allen Troshinsky. The structure is concrete through the suite level and then transitions to structural steel through the upper concourse and press level to the roof. “One of the unique aspects of this building is that it has two levels of suites that are stacked on the sides instead of suites all the way around,” Troshinsky says. “That stacking provides maximum operational flexibility in that the suites can be used in all configurations.” he explains
“The arena includes an expansive concourse, large gathering spaces and amenities that ring the concourse on the main and upper levels,” Troshinsky adds. “The 360-degree glass enclosure is also unique. It has a pillowed look to it instead of being straight up and down and is fritted so that there will be a pattern throughout the enclosure system. People inside can stand on the concourses and see the city and those outside can see activity inside the building.” DADT interiors architect Sherry Krisman says that the arena’s transparent skin defines much of the interior space as well, where wide-open concourses are bathed in light and concessions and restrooms were placed in the center of the building instead of along the outside wall. The lobby ceiling highlights the building’s design concept with brightly lit linear coves to symbolize the “energy within,” says DADT’s Janell Rock, the project’s lead interior designer. Rock says interior elements offer a hint that there is more here than meets the eye. “We didn’t want to blanket all surfaces with color and texture, [so] we pared everything down to the simplest expression of function, letting the graphics and installations, such as the Sprint technology wall, take center stage,” Rock adds. This high-tech video display at the entrance greets visitors and leaves no doubt as to who owns the arena’s naming rights. High-end technology is a key element throughout the facility, incorporating scoreboards, ribbon boards, marquee and reader boards into the fans’ experience.
Meanwhile, the terrazzo floor doesn’t have many colors or patterns, just variations of stone chips, with jade green and steel gray pieces. The zinc divider strips create a rhythm based loosely on the structural grid and patterning in the curtain wall, Rock says. Planning Pays Although Troshinsky says the project itself was “remarkably quiet,” he acknowledges that the project team did have to overcome “a fixed budget, a volatile commodities market, a busy labor market and high expectations from the community. We had to bring the scope of the work in line with the budget without sacrificing form or function. So there was a pretty extensive cost-estimating period along with preconstruction, and we did a lot of value analysis that resulted in a guaranteed maximum price within the city’s budget.” Mortenson was also acutely aware that a billion-dollar backlog of projects was vying for the attention of the area’s subcontractors. “We had to come up with ways to convince contractors that they wanted to work on our project, [and] we did this with a pretty organized marketing campaign early on,” Troshinsky says. Mortenson held open houses and meetings and provided prospective subcontractors with streamlined contract documents to make the project’s enormity less intimidating. Troshinsky says the marketing campaign paid off. The project came in under budget, and Mortenson was ultimately able to surpass the project goal of 20% minority/women contractors. Mortenson also used 3D building information modeling on all of the arena’s major systems. Paul Mangen, Mortenson’s senior MEP project coordinator, says the Sprint Center is Kansas City’s first job of this magnitude to use BIM to such an extreme. He adds that every single system was modeled from the sheet metal, sprinkler pipes and plumbing to the structural steel, glass exterior and concessions. Templates were made for every foot of the plumbing and the 2,204 trapezoidal pieces of the glass facade. None of the Sprint Center’s subcontractors had previous experience with the BIM software, which made the project a learning process for the team and ultimately benefited the whole design community, Mangen says. “Now a lot of the subs are using [3D modeling] as a marketing tool and being awarded jobs solely based off of this experience,” he adds.
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