What to Expect! Week of August 28, 2006
Foundations - More form work, rebar work, and footing placement in hole. Watch for concrete trucks coming in off of Big Bend. Walls will become evident. That's about it for this week. The big pile of dirt will remain until the lower level walls have been poured, forms stripped, and braced. The pile of dirt will get smaller as it will be used as exterior wall backfill.
Photo Round-Up: 8/21/06 - 8/25/06
Looking Out My Window
Looking out my trailer window I see an athletic field looking an awful lot like the field I played soccer on when I was in high school. Three or four different types of turf in patches, low spots, high spots, and kind of small. The girls don't seem too hampered by these imperfections, the field hockey team is looking pretty sharp. But I can imagine as they travel to other schools, occasionally they're struck with envy playing on those big beautiful fields with their perfect markings and synthetic turf! If only Nerinx Hall had one of those!
Of course this will all change soon. There are a lot of things I see out my window, but my thoughts are dominated by the challenges of next spring. We need to deliver a perfect Sportexe athletic field in a just a few months time to be ready for Fall 2007 sports. And it will be a beautiful field. It will stretch a vast 350 feet in length and 200 feet in width. That's an additional 20,000 square feet of field by my calculations. Because of this we'll have to take a small addition down off the back of Nerinx Hall, which presents us with additional challenges. But not to worry about this lost classroom space, we are more than making up for it with brand new classroom space in the Heagney. Along the northern edge of the new field will be brand new retaining walls, walkways to existing sidewalks, bleacher pads and benches. Hey, a place to sit!
So what's so special about synthetic turf? The benefits are too numerous to mention here, but comfort, performance, and environmental friendliness top the list. As anyone who's played or walked on one of these things knows, they offer the perfect blend of firmness and softness (a Missouri State Sportexe field pictured to the left). These new systems are lot better on the knees and studies have shown fewer sports related injuries as compared to older first generation systems. I suppose this has to do with the rubber and sand infill. Also no fertilizer or watering required! There is an enormous amount of irrigation water pumped on natural turf systems the world over just to keep them alive. This wasted water is then usually mixed with fertilizers and chemicals, all washing into our watersheds where the nutrients cause all sorts of problems (can you say eutrophication?). With the new field, an elaborate sub-surface drainage system will shed any rainwater immediately from the surface. This means instant playing time and no more puddles. Practice can run later into the season and start earlier in the spring. The rainwater collected by this system does not run off as quickly as water off a typical parking lot. Instead the system is designed to hold, or detain, much of the water and slowly release it to the municipal storm drain. This microdetention is a great solution for the deleterious effects of storm water runoff to your local streams (which incidentally are the Deer and Mackenzie Creeks. The Missouri DNR told me so).
So have a great field hockey, lacrosse, and soccer season...and archery, and whatever else you do out there (did I see football?!). Say good-bye to the dips, ridges and hills because a brand new field is on its way. With all those little rubber leaves of grass, I have to wonder, what would Walt Whitman say?
What to Expect! Week of August 21, 2006
Foundations - Form work, rebar work, and footing placement in hole. Watch for concrete trucks coming in off of Big Bend.
Electric - Temporary electric will be accessed from a new utility pole on west driveway.
Footings and Foundation
What holds a building up? Answer: the earth. But between the earth and the building is something called the foundation. The foundation is meant to provide something rigid, strong and level on which we can build the Heagney Theatre.
The vast majority of foundations both commercial and residential are constructed of concrete. It is an amazing substance. It's basically comprised of portland cement, tiny rocks (the aggregate) and water (among some other things). When this stuff is mixed together, a very basic chemical reaction occurs that results in a very strong solid (concrete). It's easy to use (it pours), it's pretty inexpensive, and it can conform to just about any shape foundation an architect can think of.
The foundation of the Heagney is kind of complex. The hole you see towards Big Bend is the lowest part of the theater, the basement really, and in it we'll build the art room, ceramics, prop storage and some other rooms towards the back (the West driveway). It will be served by a stairway and elevator. It will be a fun place to explore...the one portion of this basement which penetrates into the actual theatre is the orchestra pit! This small space is between and below the seats and stage.
No one has figured out how to build a building from the roof down, so we dig a big hole in the earth far enough down where we can start pouring a solid foundation of concrete. Once we have foundation walls, we'll start to pack soil pack around the walls using the stockpile of dirt you see towering over the school near the adminstration offices. The activities you'll see in the next couple of weeks will be primarily foundation related. We'll be on a fast pace to have the foundation ready to start setting steel during the first week of October. Then the building will start looking like something.
Good Oak
One unfortunate result of the new theater was the necessary removal of a number of very nice trees. The most difficult for me personally was the 42" dba pin oak (Quercus palustris) just outside of the footprint of the building. What a beautiful tree she was, straight and strong, and a canopy reaching nearly 100 feet in diameter. We tried everything we could within the given design, but our early foundation work and later overhead work would have killed her for sure. I knew the arborist who brought her down. Even he said, "what a shame". After the last of the trunk was set on the ground, I visited the pieces and was struck by the amount of biomass which lay at my feet. Years of photosynthesis, decades of converting the sun's energy to wood and bark. The energy this single tree represented was enormous. I thought of Aldo Leopold and his essay from A Sand County Almanac, "Good Oak." He writes, "There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace." I guess there's a lot of time to think about these things in February in Wisconsin. A Sand County Almanac should be required reading for all humans on our planet.
Getting Started
While most of the students were on summer break, Alberici set out to complete a few important campus alterations to help improve traffic flow. These traffic "improvements" were necessary considering a 30,000 SF theater and classroom addition is set to be constructed on property to the Northwest of the existing campus. The driveway connecting the west drive and the Lockwood loop parking area was closed permanently. Because of this, the plan called for a widening of the loop drive to accommodate two way traffic. In the back, a new driveway was constructed connecting the student parking lot with Garden Avenue, providing more flexible traffic flow routes. These improvements will take some getting used to.
Asphalt sealing, parking lot striping, new Library fire suppression, and construction zone prep all occurred over the summer break. A construction fence marks the limit of theater work. No additional trees will be disturbed.
Nerinx Hall Students arrived back at school the week of August 14th. I'm not so sure the summer construction crew was prepared for the sheer number of students returning for the new school year. First day festivities included a construction theme, the participants confusing the Alberici staff at first with all their hard hats and caution tape. I was greatly relieved to learn the hundreds of construction workers were under the supervision of Principal Kosash and not me! Our kudos go out to the human construction warning barrel.
So what's so special about synthetic turf? The benefits are too numerous to mention here, but comfort, performance, and environmental friendliness top the list. As anyone who's played or walked on one of these things knows, they offer the perfect blend of firmness and softness (a Missouri State Sportexe field pictured to the left). These new systems are lot better on the knees and studies have shown fewer sports related injuries as compared to older first generation systems. I suppose this has to do with the rubber and sand infill. Also no fertilizer or watering required! There is an enormous amount of irrigation water pumped on natural turf systems the world over just to keep them alive. This wasted water is then usually mixed with fertilizers and chemicals, all washing into our watersheds where the nutrients cause all sorts of problems (can you say eutrophication?). With the new field, an elaborate sub-surface drainage system will shed any rainwater immediately from the surface. This means instant playing time and no more puddles. Practice can run later into the season and start earlier in the spring. The rainwater collected by this system does not run off as quickly as water off a typical parking lot. Instead the system is designed to hold, or detain, much of the water and slowly release it to the municipal storm drain. This microdetention is a great solution for the deleterious effects of storm water runoff to your local streams (which incidentally are the Deer and Mackenzie Creeks. The Missouri DNR told me so).
While most of the students were on summer break, Alberici set out to complete a few important campus alterations to help improve traffic flow. These traffic "improvements" were necessary considering a 30,000 SF theater and classroom addition is set to be constructed on property to the Northwest of the existing campus. The driveway connecting the west drive and the Lockwood loop parking area was closed permanently. Because of this, the plan called for a widening of the loop drive to accommodate two way traffic. In the back, a new driveway was constructed connecting the student parking lot with Garden Avenue, providing more flexible traffic flow routes. These improvements will take some getting used to.
