Diverse Program

Princeton University Balances Old and New Projects

by Katherine S. Robertson

Princeton University's 500-acre campus is the cradle of a venerable institution, but it's also a hotspot for new construction.

With about $200 million a year in construction projects, the 260-year-old university in Princeton, N.J., offers a bustling scene for the building industry - and a challenge for contractors working around its 160 buildings and 6,677 students.

The recent workload reflected the last trend in higher education construction - the expansion of dormitory and student services offerings, said Anne St. Mauro, director of the university's office of design and construction. She said that emphasis has since shifted to a newer trend to construct advanced academic facilities for science programs.

"It's nice not always doing the same thing, project after project," she added.

Recently completed projects include the expansion of a chilled water plant on campus, which added a 2.1-million-gallon thermal storage tank, and a renovation and 14,000-sq.-ft. expansion for Aaron Burr Hall.

The signature project of the new wave of construction is the new Peter B. Lewis Science Library rising on the architecturally more modern northeast side of the campus. The $73 million building - which will consolidate the geosciences, chemistry, ecology, evolutionary biology, and molecular biology book collections - is in the right place because its design by Gehry Partners of Los Angeles clearly aims to break the mold.

advertisement

The 88,000-sq.-ft. building offers an exotic mix of curved shapes around its interior and exterior structures, and not surprisingly, a hefty task for contractors, said Frank Falciani, project manager for Skanska USA Building of Parsippany, N.J., which is construction manager on the effort and also handled the chiller plant and Aaron Burr jobs. Work on the library began more than a year ago, and construction is slated to wrap up next March.

The task of bringing Gehry's undulating shapes to life started early. Falciani said a major step was having everyone on the project team purchase and learn to use CATIA, a three-dimensional modeling software that allows each trade to visualize how its work fits into the odd-shaped structure, which features a central tower covered in cascading sheets of metal flanked by two lower-profile wings.

"There was a full-blown preconstruction effort that not only involved Skanska but also all of the other major trades, especially the steel contractor," he said. "There's not one straight piece of steel on the entire project. There is rolled steel and kinked beams that articulate in at least two directions and have many inflection points."

Though Skanska had built an equally globular Gehry building for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass., the Lewis design was still an education for its team and subcontractors, including Macedos Concrete of Flemington, N.J., and Mariani Metal Fabricators, a steel contractor from Toronto.

"One thing about a complicated design is that it yields complicated problems in the field," Falciani said. "It was a short and spiked learning curve."

The superstructure is made largely of cast-in-place concrete, though some parts use steel framing. It includes various cantilevered structures and angled portions, along with curved curtain wall systems, metal panels, and metal roofs.

"We like to joke that if it's straight, it's a mistake," Falciani said.

Work on structural steel and concrete should finish by mid-summer, with a goal to install the exterior by Nov. 1.

The Lewis project may be the most exotic on campus, but the largest effort is Whitman College, a $135 million, 225,000-sq.-ft. complex that began in 2004 and will wrap up next May. Designed by Demetri Porphyrios, a Princeton alumnus and principal with London-based Porphyrios Associates, and Einhorn Yaffee Prescott Architecture & Engineering of Albany, N.Y., the multifaceted building will house dormitory, dining, social, academic, cultural, and recreational space for 500 graduate and undergraduate students.

Whitman sits on the traditional side of campus, echoing the architecture of its older buildings, St. Mauro said.

"We're trying to mimic our original gothic design with today's technologies," she said. "It fits the character of the area."

Part of the modern twist is eschewing the 24-in.-deep masonry walls of the original structures in favor of concrete blocks clad in a 7- to 9-in. veneer of bluestone and quartzite that is visually consistent with the neighboring architecture.

"This is not your run-of-the-mill project in terms of façade," said Richard Estrin, senior vice president at Torcon of Westfield, N.J., the project's contractor. "We had to blend the look with state-of-the-art construction details."

The structural frame uses bearing-block masonry topped with hollow core plank and concrete floor topping, Estrin said. The highly pitched roofs are built with structural steel, topped with slate, and punctuated with copper-clad dormers.

Another twist is adding a slope to the site, which once housed tennis courts, because the design calls for a terraced look.

"There was a tremendous amount of earthwork," Estrin said. "There's a severe grade at a site that was once fairly flat."

In a smaller current project, the university is adding new HVAC and sprinkler systems to the Hamilton Hall dormitory and dining complex in a job designed by Einhorn Yaffee with Irwin & Leighton of New York as construction manager.

Next year, St. Mauro's team will break ground on a 45,000-sq.-ft. building for the Department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

Designed by Los Angeles-based Frederick Fisher and Partners, the three-story, glass-faced building will have a glass and stone base. Barr & Barr of New York, which in 2004 finished the $47 million Lewis Sigler Institute of Integrative Genomics on campus, is construction manager on the job.

Also planned to start next year is a new chemistry building that may have up to 300,000 sq. ft. and is being designed by London-based Hopkins Architects and Boston-based Payette Associates. The university also plans to raze five 1964 Modernist dormitories and replace them with light-brick buildings designed by New York-based Pei Cobb Freed & Partners.

St. Mauro expects the active construction pace to be the rule, not the exception.

"I see no signs of it slowing down," she said.