Building Trades News

Orange County Performing Arts Center Receives ‘Q’ Award

$200 Million, Union Built Concert Hall Recognized for Excellence in Construction click to enlarge The Alliance for Quality Construction, a Southern California association of union contractors and crafts persons, presented the Orange County Performing Arts Center with the 2007 “Q Award” for the construction of the $200 million Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall in Costa Mesa. The AQC’s “Q Award” is given annually for outstanding contributions for quality construction within the building industry of Southern California. The winner is nominated and selected by the Alliance’s membership from quality union construction projects completed in the previous year. The Concert Hall broke ground in 2003. “This concert hall is a wonderful example of what can be accomplished when the skilled men and women of the Building Trades Council come together on a project as massive and elegant at this one,” said Richard Slawson, Executive Secretary of the LA/OC Building and Construction Trades Council who addressed the crowd of over click to enlarge 200 construction industry professionals. The event was moderated by Pamela Ackrich, Chair of the Alliance for Quality Construction. Robert Medinger of Fluor Enterprises, Inc., the general contractor for Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall, provided a visual presentation of the construction process from bare land to the finished product. His insights included the fact that at any given time over 400 union craftsmen and women were on site working together to complete the award-winning Segerstrom Hall. Located on 2.5 acres adjacent to the existing Orange County Performing Arts Center, the 290,000-sq.-ft. project includes a 2,000-seat, acoustically adjustable Rene and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall and the 500-seat Samueli Theater. The building also houses a music library, two large orchestra chambers for rehearsals, eight individual rehearsal rooms, 15 dressing rooms, and a public restaurant. The hall and theater were named after real estate developer Henry Segerstrom, who donated $40 million to the privately funded project in 2000, and the Samueli Foundation, which donated $10 million in 2001. The Alliance’s member union trades and contractors successfully constructed the Cesar Pelli designed concert hall, which features a graceful curved glass facade, multi-tiered atrium lobby, Portuguese limestone exterior, and broad exterior stone stairways. Inside the concert hall are graceful balconies constructed of compound plaster, an orchestra platform and walls finished in light Canadian maple, a soaring façade for the pipe organ finished in silverleaf, three massive acoustical canopies above the performance platform also finished in silver leaf and four acoustical chambers surrounding the hall painted in sky blue. The canopies and chambers are among the elements designed by Artec Consultants, Inc. that allow the Concert Hall to be adjusted to meet the precise acoustical specifications of musicians, conductors and music directors. click to enlarge “The idea for the [exterior] came from the character of Orange County and its proximity to the ocean and from the nature of the building, which is to listen to music so that the waves of sound and the waves of the sea reflect in some of the forms of this building,” Pelli said. “In the façade and interior, sensual forms will make you feel like you have been completely enveloped by the music when you are at a concert.” Darrell Waters, Flour project director, said working with the canopies was one of the biggest challenges he faced on the project. “Because of construction sequencing, we were putting up the huge canopies at the same time the roof was going up and at the same time we were installing the terrazzo flooring,” he added. Waters said this forced crews to lower the large canopy pieces through the top of the building with a crane before the roof could be finished, which left the new flooring and interior work vulnerable to rain and other construction hazards. The concert hall is surrounded by a 50,000-sq.-ft. plaza, created by Berkeley-based landscape architect Peter Walker and Partners.

 

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