Building Trades News

The Broad Contemporary Art Museum

(BCAM), part of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s makeover, is being built next to the La Brea tar pits in LA’s Miracle Mile at break neck speed by Building Trades craft union members. The $120 million, three level, 100,000 square-foot gallery space is approximately 90 percent complete. In less than a year, an existing parking structure was demolished, an underground parking lot excavated and completed, and the twin 120-foot by 80-foot BCAM buildings erected and nearly completely clad. The museum is scheduled to open in February.

The building was designed by the Renzo Piano Building Workshop and made possible by a $50 million gift from philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad. The new building, the centerpiece of LACMA’s Transformation’s Phase I, will provide 60,000 square-feet of exhibition space on three floors and will be one of the largest column-free art spaces in the United States. The museum will feature the works of contemporary artists such as Richard Serra, Barbara Kruger, John Baldessari, Ed Ruscha, Cindy Sherman, Damien Hirst, and Chris Burden.

The project’s tight schedule and material delays created some headaches on the job, admitted Rick Thompson, job foreman for Walters and Wolfe. "The biggest challenge on this job is getting materials on time. If the material gets here late, that pushes the entire schedule back," said Thompson. "The panels were done is Salt Lake City, the glass came out of Minnesota and the steel came out of Santa Fe Springs. So, the steel was a piece of cake but the glass was a different story. Right now we have six to eight week lead times for materials; at one time it was 52 weeks. When you have to order your glass a year ahead of time, that’s tough. At one point [our glass manufacturer] had a coating machine that was down for six-weeks and that affected the materials for this job.

Long shipping distances for materials through bad weather can cause further delays on projects, according to Steve Becerra, District Council 36 Business Representative. "The type of glass that is being required nowadays is manufactured back East at the bigger glass shops. So it takes weeks for a shipment instead of days or overnight if it comes from a local shop," said Becerra. "When you have a lot of your materials being trucked over the Rockies, especially this time of year with snow storms, you can hit delays which throws off your whole schedule.

" Construction on the projects parking garage also got a little "hairy." During the construction of the underground parking structure, workers uncovered an entire wooly mammoth, and for two week the excavation became an archeological dig as the mammoth was removed from the thick tar. In addition, a layer of trapped sulfur dioxide, a deadly gas that forced construction workers to wear respirators throughout eight weeks of excavation. In the end, they had to pour a 4 1/2- foot thick floating slab, a giant lid to keep toxic gases from wafting up into the parking lot and museum. As a result, the project’s most intensely engineered aspect is totally invisible.

A unique feature of the new Broad Museum is the fact that visitors will take a stunning bright red exterior escalator to the top floor to enter the building, then work their way through the museum toward the ground floor. The ceilings of the third story galleries are made entirely of glass, as part of an elaborate system of exposed trusses, "sunshades," and roller screens that filter and direct sunlight throughout the seasons. Three hundred and eighty-eight 1 1/4 inch thick frit glass panels are suspended from cambered aluminum trusses. Rising from the trusses are south-facing, 17-foot tall, S-shaped sunshades, installed by Local 636 members, spaced ten feet apart. To keep them as light as possible, they were tensioned on site until the trusses came into square. On the Job

Rick Thompson Foreman, 28 Years; When I started, Journeymen just yelled at you all day and Apprentices just picked up trash all day, and that’s what you did for a long time. Now things are different. They have to be trained more quickly. Work has been really busy lately and its been tough even being able to take time off. The new guys have to be trained well enough so that if you need a day off, work can still continue. One of the thing that is great about being a union member is that you’re not standing out here on your own. You’ve got guys from the union helping you out. If we all had to negotiate our own wages out here, we’d all be making 7-bucks an hour. The training, especially the safety training, has definitely improved since I started in this industry. Now you get safety trained on everything you do and you get a card that says you’ve completed the training. That’s dropped our industry rate dramatically, especially the catastrophic injuries.

Edgar Rivera Apprentice, 7 months I moved over to glazing after working in one of the glass shops for five years. I like this kind of work a lot. You get to work at different jobs sites, work for different companies, and the wages are good. The apprenticeship classes are very good at preparing you for work in the field.

Dana Hallinon Journeyman, 26 Years I like getting to work outdoors and I like the people I work with. I like the fact that you have people to negotiate your wages. The curtain wall systems have changes. Now we have a lot more unitized systems. Before we would put up the stick walls, then put up the horizontals and then put in the glass. Now we are doing more unitized panel systems.

Fabian Robledo Apprentice 2 years, 4 months I used to work for a non-union company, then I tried some other jobs but didn’t really like it. A friend got me hooked up with the union and I couldn’t believe it took me so long. I really like it. One of the major differences between the union and non-union companies is safety. Everything I did working non-union was not on the safe side. In the union companies everything is by the book and very safe. I feel confident, no matter who I am working with that they are going to be doing things right and doing things safely. For once in my life I feel like a professional. I feel a part of something good, something big.