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Description: The New Wing for the Denver Art Museum
In March of 2003, Dowco was invited to attend a meeting in Denver, Colorado, to see if we were interested to join the team and help with the detailing on the new Denver Art Museum’s Frederick C. Hamilton Building. The attendees at that meeting were Paul Devereux and Erik Dunn from Mortenson (General Contractor), J.R. Barker and Wayne Muir from Structural Consultants Inc. out of Denver (Connection Design), Maria Cole from Davis & Company representing ARUP (Architects), Curtis Mayes from L.P.R. (Erector) and Bryan Pope, Carl Johnson, Jack Sibilia, David Weaver representing Zimmermen Metals Inc. (Steel Fabricator). The task ahead would require a highly developed 3-D software package to do the modeling and detailing and Dowco’s 3-D software, (Tekla Structures’ Xsteel) - was ideal for the task. This would become a challenging but rewarding project, which would take us a year to complete detailing.
This project is due to be completed by 2006 and includes 2,740 tons of steel, 230,000 square feet of Titanium Panels and 7,400 cubic yards of concrete. The prow of the Museum’s new wing will be 110 feet in height and have a 100-foot bridge to connect the old with the new building.
The Architect is award-winning and world-renowned Daniel Libeskind, who was born in Poland in 1946 and became an American citizen in 1965. Some of his famous completed projects are:
1998 - Felix Nussbaum Museum, in Osnabruck, Germany
2001 – Jewish Museum Berlin
2002 – Imperial War Museum North in Manchester, England.
He is also presently working on the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, Canada and designing the Trade Center site in New York City.
The Denver Art Museum New Wing looks like a crumpled piece of paper that has been thrown onto the floor. There were many interesting challenges and obstacles that Dowco faced and had to over come from the very beginning. We received a 3-D dxf wire frame model from ARUP, which was imported into X-steel. Each line had to be sized, hung and rotated into its correct wall plane before adjusting to suit the bracing work points and top of floor steel elevations. After this was complete, certain Work Point elevations had to be cambered which required these, plus the adjoining members, to be moved. This part of the project took almost 2 months to complete before Dowco could produce an accurate Advance Bill. This now became the Central model.
Dowco had arranged that all the Team members (General Contractor, Erector and Connection Design Engineer) had a Viewer’s License of X-steel and instructions on how to manipulate copies of the Model. This became increasingly invaluable since almost all the Wall connection nodes had numerous brace members coming in at different angles and skews. Because of the complex nature of this project, a program called NetMeeting was used along with the RFI process. This worked extremely well on the more complicated connections. We save valuable time and confusion by reviewing these problems before we they were sent on as RFI’s. Having everyone involved at these NetMeeting usually brought a better understanding, insight and input to the unique challenges that we faced.
After the model had been checked and approved, our main focus became the connections. Ninety percent of all the RFIs and NetMeetings were because of these. Dowco and CSI (Connection Design Engineers) worked very closely together to resolve these connection issues. The tireless work from our connection crew was of great benefit expediting these problems.
This project was divided up into 15 Sequences with almost 3500 shop drawings produced. Many of the more complicated column drawings took 5 or 6 sheets. Most of the shop-welded connections required plate preps, which had to be done in the model and shown, detailed out separately, on the drawings. Dowco also provide dxtv files to help Zimmerman Metals (fabricator) in its gusset plate template cutting.
Dowco is assisting by modeling and detailing most of the shoring for LPR Erectors. We also supply the xyz Target coordinates for the field, which were extracted from our model.
This teamwork approach was an excellent platform to work under, resulting in a conscientious effort and appreciation by all parties involved. Even though this was an extremely difficult project, those involved rose to the challenge and made it not only successful but also enjoyable to be a part of. With 650 RFIs produced to date, our staff has worked tenaciously. The team included Ken Mussato (Project Supervisor); Susan Gordon who looked after the modeling and connecting crew and was the “go to” person for all the NetMeetings; Don Adair, Nick Rakic and Steven Chang, our main checkers for reviewing the model, checking connections and shop drawings; plus Kirsty Newlands our Document Control person who made sure all the Transmittals, RFIs, ASIs, Bolt Lists, model exports and Target points were addressed and sent to the appropriate people. From the start, these people and many others helped keep this job running smoothly and on schedule. This truly was a TEAM effort.
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