Metal Unifies Civic Center Design

by Jonathan McGaha | March 1, 2015 12:00 am

Photo: Nic Lehoux

Designers discover solutions with metal for an unusual site

A long, thin strip of land presented multiple design challenges for Newport Beach Civic Center, Newport Beach, Calif. The 20-acre property runs north and south, is bounded by roadways on the east and west sides, and is bisected by a roadway in the northern third.

The design firm, Bohlin Cywinski Jackson[1], working out of its San Francisco and Philadephia offices, won a design competition for the
$105 million, LEED Gold-certified project, which included a city hall, parking garage, library addition and park. The structures are arranged in a U-shape with the city hall on the west side, parking garage on the east side, library addition to the south and civic green space in the middle that continues north into the park.

Steve Chaitow, AIA, LEED BD+C, principal at Bohlin Cywinski Jackson and project manager for the civic center, says the shape of the site informed design choices and it wasn’t an accident that the city hall, civic green and parking garage were all designed long and thin. “It actually serves a combination of social purposes; the garage and the city hall operate as a sieve basically, knowing that’s how people come to city halls now,” he says. “It serves as an even way to move people across with a nice civic green space in between.”

Chaitow says it was important to create a sense of center in the suburban community. Before the civic center was completed in May 2013, Newport Beach’s city hall was located west of the site in the historic center of town in a building constructed in the 1940s.

Greg Mottola, AIA, principal at Bohlin Cywinski Jackson in charge of the project, says the new location was more centralized in the community. “As the town grew, the center of gravity shifted a little bit, so the new site is actually more in the center of how things are today,” he says.

 

Out of Sight

The site is located approximately one mile from the coast and the city set height restrictions to prevent obstruction of ocean views from residential areas east of the site. “It really was the last available parcel of this size available in Newport Beach, and the reason it existed was it was considered relatively unbuildable,” Chaitow says.

Approximately 300,000 cubic yards of earth, or 20,000 truckloads, were removed and the site was lowered almost 30 feet so the buildings fit within the view plain limit. Mottola says the building footprint had to slope because the view plain followed the slope of the adjacent streets. “The [city hall] building actually subtly marches up the hill as you start from the library heading north,” Mottola says. “In sort of zones, the floor levels stagger or step up, and that’s to keep the building within the view plain limit we were working under.”

Photo: Nic Lehoux

 

Curtain Call for Metal

Mottola says the design was intended to reflect the seaside community’s lifestyle. “Rather than design a formal civic building, it was really sort of flipping that on its head and saying how do we make this really feel like it’s part of a beachside community,” he says. “And make it about being outside and making the building feel light and airy, and having it be something that could, at least in an abstract way, recall a lot about the place that it’s located in.”

The 100,000-square-foot city hall has an aluminum and glass curtainwall wrapping around three sides and a metal panel rainscreen system on the south side. “Not only does it make the building literally transparent-you can see right through it-it also means that the occupants are never far away from natural light and air,” Chaitow says.

Santee, Calif.-based Tower Glass[2] fabricated and installed the curtainwall with glazing from Viracon Inc.[3], Owatonna, Minn., and installed Kenneth Square, Pa.-based Metal Sales & Service Inc.’s Metalwërks[4] Arcwall DBV rainscreen system. “And really at the heart of the matter is a building for the public,” Mottola says. “That collection of materials was there to help make this facility feel accessible and open and inviting.”

Chaitow says metal was a natural choice for its lightness and expressiveness. “In considering the palette of materials available to us-stones and plasters and metals and other materials, along with other materials such as glass-[metals] seemed to help effectively convey these feelings of brightness, airiness and lightness that were really important to this site,” he says.

 

Raise the Roof

The two-story city hall building is divided into five bays separated by four service zones with stairs, kitchens and restrooms. Orange, Calif.-based CMF Inc.[5] fabricated and installed Woburn, Mass.- based RHEINZINK America Inc.’s[6] Flat Lock custom crimped zinc shingles on the western exteriors of the service zones.

The bays are topped with wave-shaped roofs angled to the north with operable windows underneath them. Tualatin, Ore.-based Albina Co. Inc.[7] rolled structural steel and hollow structural steel for the wave-shaped roofs, supports and trusses. Mottola says while the wave-shape roofs were symbolically shaped, they were also designed for functionality. Indirect sunlight trans- mits through the windows under the roofs on the north, east and west sides. “To make a building energy efficient and environmentally friendly, we take advantage of the temperate climate,” he says. “Operable windows allow the building to breathe naturally.”

The roofs were designed at an angle and wired to support a future array of photovoltaics, Mottola says.

 

Chambers Design Tacks Toward Recognition

RHEINZINK’s Flat Lock custom crimped zinc shingles were installed on the north end of city hall on the dome-shaped council chambers. The dome features a steel frame tensile structure with St. Petersburg, Fla.-based SEFAR Architecture[8]‘s TENARA Fabric stretched over the frame.

Known locally as the sail, the fabric-covered, curved form is visible from the roadway. “That council chamber building sits out at the street and has this iconic character to it,” Mottola says. “It’s got a sculptural form and it’s there to be in contrast to the rest of the city hall building, a sort of rigorous, repeating series of these wave-shaped grooves that march up the hillside and house all the different civic departments.”

Chaitow says the complex’s design assumes visitors will arrive by car. “That sail at the council chamber was partly there to send a cue to people driving by that this is a civic center, this is something that is distinct, and it serves as a way to slow people down as they come into the site,” he says.

 

Put it in Park

After visitors exit the 450-space parking garage, they can walk west across the civic green into city hall, south to the library or north to the park. Mottola says the civic green in the middle was an organizing element. The parking garage features a hedge of Ficus plants growing on its west side facing the civic green and city hall. “It really became a landscape edge rather than seeing a parking structure there,” Mottola says.

Anaheim Hills, Calif.-based Bomel Construction Co.[9] fabricated and installed vertical aluminum screenwalls with Kynar finishes above the garage’s entrances on the north and south sides. The screenwalls block out headlight glare and keep the structure open for ventilation.

Additionally, Design Insights Associates Inc., Los Angeles, fabricated and Bomel Construction installed Raleigh, N.C.-based Umicore Building Products USA Inc.’s[10] VMZinc’s 1-inch formed horizontal zinc wall panels on the garage’s elevator shaft.

Photo: Nic Lehoux

 

Check out the Library

The 17,000-square-foot library addition was built on the back of the existing library and faces city hall, the civic green and parking garage. “The challenge there became how do you create a really new dramatic entrance to what had been the back of the library,” Chaitow says.

Additionally, the city wanted more study space for patrons, Mottola says. “What started out as let’s just put a door on the back of the library [became] let’s add 17,000 new square feet of program to it,” he says. Tower Glass fabricated and installed aluminum framing from El Cajon, Calif.-based Vision Systems Inc.[11] with Viracon glazing for a double-height curtainwall. The curtainwall covers the north façade of the library behind a modern-looking entrance with a large, angular roof.

Mottola says there were a couple reasons the library addition was designed with the large curtainwall. “One is that it actually created a new façade for the back of the library, meaning that it wasn’t so much about attaching a new block to an old block, but it was more about putting a new skin on the back of the old library,” he says. “Then internally in that space itself, by having it long and thin like that, it allowed everyone to have access to natural light- the same strategy as the city hall-rather than having a chunky block somewhere.”

Space was created on either side of the new entrance to house a small café and restaurant. CMF fabricated and installed VMZinc’s horizontal flat zinc panels on the exteriors of the retail spaces. “[The addition] increased the social aspects of the library,” Mottola says.

 

Building Bridges

The 14-acre park features winding trails, picnic areas, three bridges that traverse a wetland and a pedestrian bridge that crosses a nine-lane roadway into a dog park. SME Steel[12], West Jordan, Utah, fabricated and installed the wetland bridges with architecturally exposed structural steel and Ipe wood decking.

Structural steel was used throughout the project and Bohlin Cywinski Jackson received a 2014 Innovative Design in Engineering and Architecture with Structural Steel award from The American Institute of Steel Construction. “It’s received some recognition for that, using structural steel as the expressive element, and really integrating and collaborating in order to come up with a project that makes the two knit together inextricably,” Chaitow says. “The story of the steel is the story of the architecture and vice versa.”

SME Steel also fabricated and installed structural steel for the pedestrian bridge that goes over the roadway. Southwest Steel[13], Henderson, Nev., fabricated and installed steel railings and CMF fabricated and installed VMZinc 1-inch formed horizontal zinc panels on the bridge’s elevator shaft, the same type installed on the parking garage’s elevator shaft. “The big gesture that tries to knit together the park, which is cut by that roadway, is this pedestrian bridge that we designed that spans the entire nine-lane highway, and then also has this great overlook,” Mottola says. “The bridge has this cantilevered platform at its end that is a spot that you can look back, see the civic center and then see all the way to the ocean.”

The public has been getting substantial use from the new park, Mottola says. “I think that the crown jewel of the whole project is actually the park, as far as the thing that the public has gotten so much out of, taking what was an unused piece of land and turning it into this great public amenity.”

[14]

 

Newport Beach Civic Center, Newport Beach, Calif.
Owner: City of Newport Beach
Architect: Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, San Francisco and Philadelphia
General contractor: C.W. Driver, Irvine, Calif.
Glazing contractor: Tower Glass Inc., Santee, Calif.
Railing fabricator: Southwest Steel, Henderson, Nev.
Steel bender and roller: Albina Co. Inc., Tualatin, Ore.
Storefront fabricator/installer: Architectural Glass and Aluminum, Livermore, Calif.
Structural steel fabricator/installer: SME Steel, West Jordan, Utah
Zinc fabricator/installer: CMF Inc., Orange, Calif.
Zinc fabricator, parking garage elevator shaft: Design Insights Associates Inc., Los Angeles
Zinc installer, parking garage elevator shaft/screenwall fabricator/installer: Bomel Construction Co., Anaheim Hills, Calif.
Curtainwall/skylight glazing: Viracon Inc., Owatonna, Minn., www.viracon.com[15]
Curtainwall framing: Vision Systems Inc., El Cajon, Calif., www.visionsystems.com[16]
Operable windows/fabricator: Schüco, Newington, Conn., www.schueco.com[17]
Rainscreen fabricator: Metalwërks by Metal Sales & Service Inc., Kenneth Square, Pa., www.metalwerksusa.com[18]
Skylight framing/installer/fabricator: Metcoe Skylight Specialties, Gardena, Calif., www.metcoe.com[19]
Tensile fabric: SEFAR Architecture, St. Petersburg, Fla., www.tenarafabric.com[20]
Tensile structure: Eide Industries Inc., Cerritos, Calif., www.eideindustries.com[21]
Zinc wall panels: RHEINZINK America Inc., Woburn, Mass., www.rheinzink.us[22], and Umicore Building Products USA Inc., Raleigh, N.C., www.vmzinc-us.com[23]

Source URL: https://www.metalarchitecture.com/articles/metal-unifies-civic-center-design/

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