Silver Spring Library - Racing the Clock
SSL nighttime rendering—image by Brian Essig, the Lukmire Partnership © 2009
SSL rendering with bridge—image by Brian Essig, the Lukmire Partnership © 2009
SSL site plan—image by the Lukmire Partnership, © 2010
The bond funds for the Silver Spring Library were set at $36 million with a $3 million contingency. Our estimators, Downey Scott, were telling us the schematic design lay somewhere north of $44 million, including the art center and HHS office floors.
Ike Leggett, County Exec, had been quoted in the press that Montgomery County planned to build into the Great Recession, going against the regional trend of cutting back. This was 2008-2009 and the country was reeling from the collapse of the housing bubble. Libraries were cutting back hours just to save their budgets, so building anew was an act of courage.
Best tale of the housing fiasco is Michael Lewis’s The Big Short. Lewis chose, as the book’s protagonists, the handful of brokers and investors who saw it coming and shorted the market–in laymen’s terms betting against it. And they didn’t hide what they were doing. That major institutions bought their proffered shorts should explain the core of the problem. Greed has always been endemic on the trading floor, only now all the adults had left the room.
“The work follows people who believed the bubble was going to burst, like Meredith Whitney, who predicted the demise of Citigroup and Bear Stearns; Steve Eisman, an outspoken hedge fund manager; Greg Lippmann, a Deutsche Bank trader; Eugene Xu, a quantitative analyst who created the first CDO market by matching buyers and sellers; the founders of Cornwall Capital, who started a hedge fund in their garage with $110,000 and built it into $120 million when the market crashed; and Michael Burry, an ex-neurologist who created Scion Capital.”
Possibly, Ike Leggett, the County Exec and his lead DGS manager, David Dise, were betting, that with the construction industry in a death spiral, it could be possible to buy on the cheap.
But our independent estimators were cautioning that wasn’t the case. The Lukmire Partnership had relied on separate cost estimators since we began back in 1989, as insurance against client overreach as well as our own.
A good friend in Florida told the story of when he worked for an architect who enjoyed bragging to his private clients, ‘you’ll run out of money before I run out of ideas.’ You won’t get away with that working in the public sector. Most public officials like to keep their jobs–and we liked keeping them as clients.
We were closing in on the County’s Mandatory Referral process, and the long, tortured site plan review, both of which were stakes in the ground for what would be permitted and built. Major revisions made after the fact implied going back through the design to find the corrections without missing anything–and losing time. There’s a fundamental truth about construction that the longer it takes the more expensive it becomes; prices rarely drop over time. The costs of manufacturing and transportation don’t decline; if lucky, they don’t go up, or the unions don’t go on strike–losing time. And we were planning to buy a great deal of concrete and steel.
We had given costs–the size of the library was based on the building program–separate entrances, one from Wayne Avenue and the second on Fenton Street – three elevator cores plus escalator runs from grade to the third floor–a green roof to help meet the water quality regs–an RFID book sorting system with automatic book conveyors. The Silver Spring Library would be a flagship project for the County’s library system to rival the one built for Rockville. Adding to the complications was David Dise’s insistence on ‘making it memorable.’ Couldn’t help but think, ‘you’re going to run out of money…’
SSL Fenton Street Pavilion—image by the Lukmire Partnership, © 2010
Project dieting was in order – euphemistically termed ‘value engineering.’ First on the chopping block was the structural glazing we’d proposed for the Fenton Street ‘pavilion’ –my name for it–and the escalators rising three levels in a single run. Structural glazing employs nothing but glass; it’s self supporting. And expensive. “One does want a hint of color…” So we went back to the drawing board (literally) designing with aluminum mullions supported in turn by an interior steel armature. But the overall concept of a glass pavilion housing escalators had been sold in public hearings to the County planners, so the best we could do was to create a two-tiered escalator run (shorter runs are less expensive). But my stairway to heaven, a single, curving stair, survived. As did the adult reading room positioned above with sweeping views of downtown–also surviving was the roof garden seen from the fifth floor children’s area.
The elevators were a problem. With two entrances, we needed two public elevator cores. Unlike a typical office building elevator core, these needed to be duel purpose–bringing patrons up to the third floor, then independently run between the three library floors without bypassing the RFID book security system, whose check out was to happen only on the third floor. If you picked up your copy of The Big Short on the fourth floor adult area, you needed to get it checked out on the third floor, i.e. not bypassing the third floor returning to street level. I tried advising the librarians to locate RFID checkout stations on all three floors facing the elevator banks, but they insisted everyone needed to come and go by way of the third floor.
From decades of building for highrise office buildings, the elevator companies had devised “destination dispatch” systems, allowing people to select the specific floor they intended to travel to, and delivering them there and only there. So once your books had been checked out, you could press ‘street level’ and bypass the other floors; what you could not do was ride from the fifth floor down to the street, or vice versa. Keeping in mind that if you wanted to go to the sixth or seventh HHS office floors, the elevator would not stop at the library levels. Destination dispatch, although much explained, didn’t win the librarians’ endorsement.
Building Organization
The first two floors are given over to the Wayne Avenue and Fenton Street lobbies, a book drop off / reserve book kiosk and the art gallery/store. The Fenton Street lobby includes a small coffee bar. The 2nd floor is space for the nonprofit art center.
SSL First floor plan—image by the Lukmire Partnership, © 2010
SSL Second floor plan—image by the Lukmire Partnership, © 2010
The building’s 3rd floor is the library’s entrance level, along with the library workroom and staff offices, meeting rooms, disabled services, and young adult collection. Included with the YA area is a ‘maker space’ equipped with graphics software and several 3D printers.
SSL Third floor plan—image by the Lukmire Partnership, © 2010
4th floor houses the adult collections, group study rooms, computer classroom, tutoring rooms and the adult quiet study (reading) room overlooking Fenton Street and the park below.
SSL Fourth floor plan—image by the Lukmire Partnership, © 2010
5th floor houses the children’s collection and associated children’s program room, early lit and tutoring rooms. Unlike in other libraries, the children’s program room is designed with rolling glass doors, allowing it to function as additional reading space when not being used for programs (story time being the most popular one).
SSL Fifth floor plan—image by the Lukmire Partnership, © 2010
SSL Green roof plan—image by the Lukmire Partnership, © 2010
Library Atrium
For its patrons, the challenge of a 65,000 square foot library divided on three floors is primarily one of orientation. Secondarily, giving patrons the sense of being in a single building. To overcome the building’s scale, we designed an atrium with staircase connecting all three floors. The granite and steel staircase wrapping the opaque glass shaft takes a prominent position in the atrium to encourage patron usage in lieu of the elevators.
SSL atrium stair at 3rd floor—image by Brian Essig, the Lukmire Partnership, © 2009
SSL atrium stair at 4th floor w/ ‘red box’ beyond—image by Brian Essig, the Lukmire Partnership, © 2009
The ‘red box’ is the atrium’s other major feature, red because Parker Hamilton, Director of Libraries, loved the color. As viewed from the street, the red box was to wrap the two adult group study rooms as a single sculptural element. The screen’s top quarter surrounds a children’s early lit area on the children’s floor, and the lower quarter disguises a large air handler, so that the overall ‘red box’ is to the scale of the encompassing atrium. It cantilevers out from the main floor slabs into the atrium.
We had been using red in the public presentations, making it visible in the renderings, hoping to design something a bit less startling, but it didn’t seem Parker wanted to change from red. Brian Essig had carefully detailed an open wood grillage, but she shot that down–after the project was already bid. I fought hard for Brian’s design, but to no avail.
My partner, Robin Puttock, had been leading the construction documentation work. She scrambled, researching various perforated metal products, and landed on the local manufacturer who built the screen in metal.
Ceilings in Another Plane
Two things I felt important designing such large, open-plan floors were one, tall spaces (at eighteen feet) and two, dropped ceilings only where necessary to hide the HVAC air handler boxes. About the only positive thing one can say in regard to suspended acoustical ceilings is they look good up until the first big maintenance cycle requires access to what’s above them–then the dings and dents, along with a few smudges from being handled begin to show. Or worse, the tiles start to sag. In ten years, the replacement tiles don’t match the original ones, and the color’s wrong, and the grid is no longer level…
In the smaller scale study rooms and office areas, we did employ dropped ceilings. But in the open library I wanted exposed ductwork, pendent lights and a minimum of clutter, driving the mechanical engineers to drink. If Steve Jobs had made his career in mechanical engineering, we’d all be living in a much tidier environment.
Though the industry has made advances in technology, there are no courses in college for beautiful mechanical systems.
Interior Reflections on a Form
Mentioned in the last article on the Silver Spring Library was the 3:4:5 diagonal created parallel to the train tracks carving across the site. What fascinated me about the diagonal was how effortlessly the geometry fit–not always the case, this serendipity. As the building form became refined during the schematic design phase, the building’s skin along Fenton Street adopted the diagonal, with the curved entrance pavilion tucked in beside it. Along with the story-tall steel trusses that cantilevered the tracks, these larger elements became the dominant form of the building.
The interior layouts were evolving in response to the exterior diagonal and the curvilinear form of the Fenton Street pavilion. We wanted each floor to be read as a single entity, highlighted by lesser volumes and kiosks inside the larger floor. On the adult floor, the computer classroom became the object; on the children’s floor, the program room repeated in the same area of the overall plan. Both were shaped using curves. Curves can easily mediate non-orthogonal geometries. What it allows us to do was to bring the diagonal deeper into the interior, and since it didn’t affect the orthogonal structural frame, we weren’t doing anything different than playing one against the other. Ultimately, floor patterns, ceiling geometries, even the book stack arrays joined in the game.
SSL 4th floor group study rooms (aka ‘red box’) with atrium stair beyond
Image by Brian Essig, the Lukmire Partnership, © 2009
Exterior Skin
From early in the design process, glass played an important role. The idea was to create the most transparent skin so that the library would glow, particularly on gray winter days. If we weren’t to have a street level façade for the library itself, we’d make it a nighttime jewel hung over the street. As such, a great deal of attention was applied to how the curtainwall skin was to look.
From the scars of the earlier Shirlington Library / Signature Theatre project, I’d come across a Maryland company whose specialty was structural glazing and unitized curtainwall systems. The Shirlington general contractor had claimed the glass curtainwall we’d designed couldn’t be manufactured except by a company in Hong Kong.
Rochester Glass, two states north had the glass, so that wasn’t true.
They really meant they hadn’t found a cheap enough product, regardless of the contract they’d signed. This was the sort of game contractors in the public sector love playing, hoping to bluff their way past. Instead, Jesse Almario, the Arlington County project manager and I went shopping for glass.
Victor Cornellier, Chairman of TSI Corporations, is a character out of the old school, gruff, blunt and very capable. When I googled the firm’s website, I found he lists among other credentials being President of the Ironworkers Employers Association of Washington, D.C., and trustee on the welfare and pension plans for Iron Workers Local Union #5, Washington D.C. His two sons are the firm’s Operating President and COO. For the Shirlington project, when I told him we needed fourteen by eight foot glass units, he acted as if ‘so what?’ When I told him the County intended to contract directly with him, he gave another shrug. We had our glass.
Construction is a hard nosed business. When you find fair-minded contractors, they stay with you. I’ve been accused of hating contractors, which isn’t true. Mistakes aside, I don’t like cheats and liars. I get along fine with the foremen and laborers.
Vic and I had a nice laugh over Shirlington, and he put us in touch with an engineering outfit out of Texas who specialized in unitized glazing systems. I was shopping this time for butt-glazed glass units that could span eighteen feet floor to floor. Butt-glazed to visually imitate structural glazing from the exterior without the same expense (with the glass silicone-glued to the interior frame).
The glass industry is complicated, to say the least. First, you have glass manufacturers, such as PPG, then you have curtainwall system manufactures such as Kawneer and YKK, then installers as TSI. Curtainwall glazing comes in aluminum and steel systems, though aluminum dominates the market. The least expensive curtainwall is what’s referred to as ‘stick built’ meaning it comes to the job site unassembled, and the glass uninstalled. Unitized glazing comes in premanufactured units, frame and glass together and is craned unit at a time into place on site. What you pay more for is the more skilled plant assemblies, and what you get is a better product and faster field installations–such as TSI can perform.
There will be a test at the end of this section.
We had our product. Randy Haist, our structural engineer, TSI’s engineers from Texas, Vic and we collectively worked through the problems of connecting the glazing units to the library’s structure. Engineers spoke to engineers, architect whining and weedling the best he could get from them, and Vic enjoying the show. Actually, Vic described the installation process to his uneducated audience. God in this instance was totally in the details.
Atrium Smoke Exhaust
Fire safety engineers and fire marshals as a rule hate atrium spaces, based on a frightening history of bad fires, a most famous one being the MGM Grand’s fire a hotel/casino in Los Vegas where a kitchen area fire’s smoke migrated into the hotel tower in 1980 when 85 people were asphyxiated. In that instance, there wasn’t an atrium per se, only a badly built complex with no fire sprinklers and plenty of paths for the smoke to rise into the hotel tower.
Multi-story buildings whose floors are interconnected above two stories require automatic smoke removal systems. When the fire alarms go off–for any reason including false alarms–exhaust fans sized to suck the smoke from the space start to work. And since it’s generally frowned on to not provide people with their oxygen, the system must have intake windows. The system work as follows: alarms start, windows open mechanically, and the fans kick in. The suction is impressive, and so the windows must open first before the fans come on–or the suction could delay or stall them from opening.
Our atrium connected three, large, very open library floors, and it was to be at the heart of the library’s circulation. When challenged about the cost, I reminded the County staff of their boss’s directive. The four roof exhaust fans are the size of airplane engines, and sound about as loud. And they required full height intake doors opening along an entire face of the building. I’m sure Brian enjoyed figuring out where these intake doors could go. I got a kick from testing the system during our final occupancy inspections. A fire alarm tech pulled an alarm, twenty-five doors swung open in unison like dancers on Broadway, then the chorus of the fans came on line. You’d have thought the building was beginning to levitate. There’s a video of the tests somewhere but I don’t have it.
Great Balls of Fire
During the permit process, our friendly MDTA transit engineers threw us another curve ball. They announced that it was possible a train on-fire coming into the station below could produce a 50,000 BTU fire, which in their opinion, would burn the library above. Secondarily, assuming the smoke exhaust system kicked in (as it would under alarm), the intake doors would draw the smoke into the library floors. I asked the obvious question: why did the MDTA folks think a train operator would drive a burning train under the building, but never got an answer. When I asked how an electric train could produce such an enormous fire, the answer was the interior were all plastic and foam. Good to know.
Nice to hear of these things at the last minute; the project was shortly going to bid and then into construction. Only now it wasn’t unless we could solve the problem.
I reached out to John O’Neal, a fire safety engineer I’d worked with previously, who joined us for the next meeting. Yes, his firm could model the theoretical fire. The County’s fire marshal, to his credit, wasted no time. He laid out a very specific plan of attack. We needed to perform a computer modeling of the fire to answer several questions: one, determine how long it would take to evacuate the building, and two, test the building’s structure against a train fully enveloped in fire sitting under the library. Would the structure withstand 50,000 BTU heat at a steady state (meaning it would never diminish or burn out) and without the influence of fire sprinklers? The fact that we had already created a 3D model of the building saved time, though it still took weeks to model the fire and the clock was ticking.
We expected to hear that the glass curtainwalls on the two lower levels facing the station would be melted thus those floors exposed to the fire, though the building’s fire stairs were to be 3 hour rated concrete with the stair exits facing away from the station. If needed, fire curtains could be installed.
The results of the fire modeling said it would take +/- 20 minutes to evacuate the building, and no, the concrete and steel structure would not collapse, even without benefit of the fire sprinklers. And no, given the locations of the smoke intake high on the building, the smoke exhaust system would not draw in smoke from the theoretical train disaster. The additional engineering was expensive, but we got the building permit.
The permit folks were so impressed with John O’Neal’s work, they said ‘we can’t inspect all that fireproofed steel’ once it was installed (my story, I get to tell it). The other half of the County who were our clients, asked O’Neal’s crew to serve in that capacity.
Through those years, I think I wrote 25 or 30 change requests, more than I’d ever done, and most going to the consultants we’d added to the team.
7 Stories Vs. 5 Stories
Taking a step back, somewhere at 50% completion of the construction phase, the County staff finally were convinced the budget couldn’t be stretch to include the two HHS office floors. We were directed to lop off the floors–”but don’t let it hold up the schedule.”
There’s an often-used observation that the further you go in the design process, the less able you are to affect cost, given how much has already been decided. This particular decision, had it been done during conceptual or schematic design, would have had next to no impact on the schedule. As it was, removing two floors now meant Randy Haist and his structural engineers needed to go back to square one, reason being he was counting on these two floors to weigh down the trusses cantilevering fifty feet feet and three stories of library. Oh crap.
Beam and column sizes would need to be beefed considerably, impacting duct clearances, elevator cores, vertical pipe risers. Caissons with rock anchors would need to go down the bedrock.
If you ever want to see what a story-high truss looks like, let me know; I will give you the tour.
Additionally, on the ‘back end’ of the building, furthest from the cantilever, we’d been expecting to use a traditional cast stone and concrete masonry wall where the windows were fewest. Randy came back with some monstrously large beams to carry the exterior wall. To lighten the load, we (mostly Robin and Brian) researched a European wall system using lighter-weight terracotta rain screen. One always wants to keep the structural engineers happy. Brian was losing his hair and Robin was losing sleep as was I.
Rock ‘n Roll Schedule
I’ve been known to advise owners that we can deliver on schedule, under budget with a great design–but they can only have two out of three, their choice. We had been stuck in schematic design for months while issues of cost and building program were being debated (the entire process start to finish = 8 years). We had an army of consultants and engineers engaged, and the County had a second army of independent consultants watching over the process. We were not herding cats, but cats and dogs–and stray sheep on occasion. That was Robin’s unthankful job. I worked with the engineers to develop the larger concepts, and Robin redlined the hell out of their drawings.
Given the need to recoup time, we decided to use AutoCAD’s Revit (3D) software. Brian and I went to class to learn the software—he learned more than I did. Randy’s structural team was already using Revit, so we would be much closer integrated. They had their 3D model and we had ours; models were exchanged every week. Brian was the lucky person who was tasked with it.
The recent evolution in the architectural world from 2D drafting to 3D models paralleled my own time in the profession, and was something I’d been pursuing since graduate school programming in Fortran IV. I love freehand sketching and drafting by hand. I drew pen and ink from college days. But when the software finally approached its true potential, I was on board. My best guess is the construction industry is about 75% there now.
But we were told that we had two months to complete the documents–work that rationally would take twice that time. Half the office was already working on the project; we had no more people. Scrambling, we recruited another local firm who we knew, Winstanley Architects and Planners. Michael Winstanley was another Yale grad a few years before my time there. His partner, George Eisenberger and intern, Leehung Hong (two more Ivy League architects) joined the team. Now we had, manner of speaking, more horsepower which was cool, but more of them cats for Robin to herd.
By this time, Robin was carrying home rolls of prints to redline and hand back the next day. I don’t think she spent much time with her daughters or spouse during the process. Also by this time, Brian was sitting for his licensing exam–from intern to architect in two years. Robin had been an intern herself, joining the firm some ten years before only recently graduated from Virginia Tech. She was now a partner. Brian was soon to officially become our project architect.
Clearing the Deck
The County announced they would be prequalifying the general contractors for the library project, meaning they’d ask the contractors to submit qualifications and go through an interview process to weed out the unqualified. Low bidder would still likely win the project, however the intent was to look at their previous work, examining things like delivering on time and without the usual game of lowballing the bid to make it up later with claims.
From the contractors’ side, they are asked to accurately price a project made up of ten thousand moving parts of which perhaps only 80-90% have been adequately described in the contract documents and built by ten or twenty subcontractors all of whom needed to do the same with their separate pieces of the puzzle, knowing at any time the owners might change their minds.
This country’s public sector construction has evolved into a roll of the dice on too many occasions. The financial stability of companies, their skills at execution, and the subcontractors who bring their issues along with them, can make it a crap shoot. Prequalifying the general contractors is a toe-in-the-water attempt to address the uncertainties. But the heart of the issue is that owners cannot see the contractors’ cards, the market is always fluid, and too often gamblers are attracted to the game–much like the investment bankers who marketed housing mortgage tranches comprised of junk.
The next phase of the project would prove to be interesting.