Featured Project: Panama - Bridge of Life, Museum of Biodiversity
Malcolm Muir, Project Manager

The Bridge of Life: Museum of Biodiversity project located in Panama is another wonderful example of Frank Gehry's unique architectural design style; his best known example of course, being the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain.

Dowco did not work on that project, but we did provide the detailing for the Pritzker Pavilion in Chicago and now the Panama Museum.

This project is being built at the Pacific entrance to the Panama Canal and will be easily visible from cruise ships either entering or exiting.

To say that detailing a Gehry project is a challenge would be to understate the effort and achievement of the people involved in producing these detail drawings; it is very demanding indeed.

The engineering was carried out by Magnusson Klemencic in Seattle, who for those of you who may remember the job, were also the engineers we worked with when we detailed the Mariner's Stadium roof, also in Seattle. They are a wonderful company to be involved with on any kind of project, but with one as complicated as this they are undeniably a piece of good fortune.

The Panama Museum consists of 16 separate buildings, or at least 16 separate and different roofs, each of which has its own unique shape and geometry involving many different sloping and intersecting planes that will create a jagged and twisting silhouette and with their different and bright colors will be visible from a great distance.

The project was originally begun in November 2003 and then put on hold in June 2004, before finally being resurrected in August 2006 and is still in the final throes of completion. All of the drawings that had been completed during the initial phase had to be re-worked to suit the requirements of the fabricators who came on board at the beginning of the second phase and approximately 775 drawings were detailed using both metric and imperial dimensions until it was decided that this requirement could be waived in favour of a different technique.

In addition to converting between 3 different software packages, Catia with the architect, AutoCAD with the fabricator and our own Tekla Structures, we also had to contend with some language difficulties as the General Contractor and some of the fabricators spoke only Spanish, although the patience and translation abilities of some members of the team eliminated any real problems.

Approval of the structure and connections was carried out by model transfer between Dowco, the engineer and the architect and another tool utilized to great success was the use of net meetings to resolve problems and discuss revisions.

Dowco completed just over 1200 detail drawings if we just consider the actual "Shipping mark", but if we take into account the number of multiple sheets involved with some of these, the number rises to just over 2000; some of the pieces required as many as 10 full size 24x36 sheets to adequately detail.

The entire roof system weighs in at a mere 337 tons but the number of pieces that required detailing tallies out at 22,932 including all connection material.

The erection of the structure should prove to be an interesting challenge as there are very few, if any, actual vertical or horizontal members. On previous structures like this we have provided targets and 3D coordinates at the critical locations, but on this particular project the erector declined this option, although even with these, maintaining the positions until the members are locked in place would still be complicated, but he obviously has some other method in mind with which he is more comfortable.

Although the core group at Dowco numbered about 10 people, at various times over the 4 year time frame, closer to 50 people put time into the job, so most of the Burnaby office and some of the Whonnock office can claim some connection with this very unique and successful project.