WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 18, 2009
by Dan RafterSt. LouisEach issue, Midwest Real Estate News highlights a unique commercial construction project, detailing the challenges that local developers faced in bringing these buildings to life. This time, we focus on the new three-story Danforth University Center at
Washington University in St. Louis, recently built by
Clayco.
The 115,880-square-foot Danforth University Center houses WUTV-TV, the Student Life newspaper, the student union, student and faculty dining areas, conference rooms, campus life offices, a game room and a common area. The building, which is being considered for LEED Gold certification by the
U.S. Green Building Council, is built over a three-story 520-car parking garage that was an earlier Clayco project. The center opened in July of 2008.
Midwest Real Estate News spoke with Kirk Warden, senior vice president and partner with Clayco, about this project.
Midwest Real Estate News: The Danforth University Center at Washington University certainly was no ordinary project. What were some of the features that made it such a unique job?
Kirk Warden: The very first thing that I would mention is that this project is not only the Danforth project that you can see when you drive by. It's also what's under it, a deep concrete parking garage that the Danforth Center sits on top of. One of the big challenges that multiple players on both projects had to deal with was that the timetables were different. We started the garage, and really put the walls in the foundation of the garage, before the Danforth Center was even through the design phase.
MWREN: That couldn't have been all that easy to schedule.
Warden: The type of coordination and collaboration that had to take place was challenging and difficult for both teams. The only common thread was that Washington University was the client on both jobs and that Clayco was the builder on both jobs.
MWREN: How much work went into making sure that both the garage and the Danforth University Center fit in well with the rest of the Washington University campus?
Warden: We put a lot of time into trying to get the Danforth Center designed in a way that fit the architecture that the university was looking for. Also, we had to follow the structural parameters that came with having a parking garage underneath it. Washington University prides itself on having some fabulous gothic architecture. The Danforth Center tended to follow that style. That style has a lot of big, heavy architectural elements to it. They were figuratively heavy and physically heavy, made of granite and stone and concrete block. You can imagine the challenges of designing that collegiate gothic, the flexibility you need to have chimneys and turrets and buttresses, and to do it all to fit on the lip of a garage.
MWREN: You also had to do some pretty intense demolition work for this project, right?
Warden: We had to demolish a building known as Prince Hall, which served as a connector for campus infrastructure. The phone lines and power lines went through there. The sanitary storm lines went through that hall. When that building went down, which we had to do to build our underground garage, we had to abandon a lot of that infrastructure. We had to restructure and re-route and clean up the campus infrastructure in that area. We extended some of it down to a different part of campus where the majority of the university's residence halls are located.
MWREN: How complicated was that process?
Warden: We removed an organ, a living organ right in the middle of campus with all those critical systems running through it. We replaced all the systems. We organized them all. When we dug this gigantic hole where this living organ was, we had to keep everything running. And this all had to be done between commencement and the start of the very next school year. The hot-water loop was one of the utilities that had been running through that hall. That provides the heating when winter gets here, so we had to have that done. The chilled-water loop, too, which provides the cooling when the students are back, went through there. We had to have that running by the time the school year started, too.
MWREN: Was there a lot of pressure to create a nearly perfect building here?
Warden: You face that with any type of facility like a student union, where it has so many different users that not only have a stake in what is being built but also in how it feels and how it operates. If you look at the programs in that building, it ranges from radio broadcasting to the food-service functions to the coffee shop to the breakout rooms or gathering spaces. There are offices in that facility. There is student government. There are student organizations that occupy those facilities.
MWREN: You also had to show some flexibility to deal with late changes.
Warden: Near the end of construction, there was a change made to the kitchen equipment that was going to be used in the building. They changed some dramatic pieces of large equipment. We had to go in there while it was under construction and adapt and be flexible enough to make those changes to accommodate this need. It wasn't just us, of course, but the designers, the kitchen operator, Washington University. You need great teamwork to pull changes like that off.
MWREN: You must be pleased that with all these changes, you were still able to achieve LEED Gold certification.
Warden: We were trying to achieve the LEED Silver certification. That requires a certain amount of credits that you have to earn. I'd say about halfway through the project, it looked like we were certainly going to make those credits. We got together as a team and thought about what steps we'd have to take to get to gold, to move another level up. We rolled up our sleeves and targeted that next group of points. We set down with a plan. We haven't been certified yet, but we think we're going to get gold.
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