ASU Comes to Phoenix

By Scott Blair

For years the City of Phoenix has struggled with attracting people to the core downtown area. Projects such as Arizona Center, Chase Field and America West Arena brought scores of people downtown, but once the events ended, people fled.

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With the new Light Rail, Phoenix Convention Center and the Sheraton Downtown Hotel, the city may finally be reaching critical mass in their goal for a "24/7" downtown.

Yet it will likely be ASU's Downtown Phoenix Campus that will have the most immediate impact. This month, 4,000 students will materialize into an area formerly occupied by non-descript buildings and vacant lots.

The project was brought from design to completion during a construction schedule barely longer than two semesters at ASU.

The project consists of three separate structures. 411, so named for its location at 411 N. Central Avenue, encompassed the renovation of a nine-story, 50-year-old building.
Park Place, located near the Arizona Center between 2nd and 3rd streets, is a 20-year-old, four-story structure that will be converted from office space into the College of Nursing.

The third part is a tenant improvement/build-out of 16,000 sq. ft. at the Mercado, a space that ASU already occupies in downtown Phoenix, which will house laboratories for the College of Nursing.

The same design build team that was in place for last year's successful City of Phoenix TGen/IGC Headquarters was assembled for the ASU Downtown Campus, including the Phoenix offices of contractor DPR Construction Inc. and architect SmithGroup, Inc.

"Having an established team provided the continuity for us to hit the ground running as soon as we were authorized to proceed by the city," said Dave Elrod, project executive with DPR. "We understood how to work with each other, and we already knew our processes and what worked and what didn't without going through a long learning curve."

Phoenix has transitioned to alternative delivery methods on most construction projects they fund, including construction manager at risk, design build and design-build-operate.

"When speed is of the essence, that's when we turn to design build," said Wylie Bearup, city engineer for Phoenix. "I honestly didn't see a way to get the project done in this time frame if we hadn't used a design build project delivery."

The city will own the facilities, but ASU has entered into a long-term lease with the city.

The school had a prominent role in the design build process, which might have led to delays under a traditional delivery method. "Having the two entities, it just takes a little longer to get drawings generated and contractor bids to work out," Bearup said. "By blending the design and build functions within one team, you are able to achieve some premiums in speed and coordination."

411 will house the College of Public Programs and University College. It will also provide student services space for the entire downtown campus. Classrooms occupy part of the second and most of the third level, while administration offices occupy the upper stories.

A two-story lobby greets students as they enter 411. "From the get-go we wanted to
make the first floor a one-stop shop for student services, so it had to be interactive, open and inviting," said Patrick Panetta, assistant director of real estate development for ASU. The registrar, financial aid, tutoring, counseling and bursar departments will all have offices encircling the lobby.

To keep these student service functions visible and easily accessible, the existing double-height lobby was opened up even further by removing extraneous features such as a large fountain in the center. On the second story, the classroom walls adjacent to the lobby were removed and in-filled with glass.

The lobby will also serve as a flexible space for banquets and lectures. A monumental stair was added, comprised of a structural steel riser system with pre-cast and ground concrete treads and landings.

The stairs are pre-wired for sound to allow for podium placement during events. The lobby will also contain various audio-visual elements through flat panel media displays.

All of the classrooms are mediated, two of which will include high-speed video conferencing. Over 800,000 lin. ft. of cabling was used on the project, according to Elrod. Kearney Electric of Phoenix performed electrical and IT cabling on the project.

411 was added to the Northwind cooling loop, the city's first district cooling plant that began operating at Chase Field in 2001. "The building originally had its own central plant with multiple chillers, which were all decommissioned and removed," Elrod said.

"Not only did that reduce the equipment and service needs for the building, but ASU also gained valuable space to use for the main area of the library."

When the building opened in the 1950's, it served as a bank. "To recapture the history of the building, the old bank vault still remains on the lower level, and has become a computer lab," said Edward Garcia, AIA, principal with SmithGroup. "Because the program space was so desperately needed first and foremost, we kept working with the budget to try to piecemeal together a storyline of the raw building itself and what was beautiful about it."

However, 411's history as an office building posed challenges. "The column base spacing is a lot tighter than what would be in a traditional classroom-type building,"

Garcia said. This posed problems with sight lines for some of the larger classrooms, as the widest column spacing did not exceed 28-ft. The solution was to incorporate columns in the perimeters between circulation spaces and the classroom seating area.

Initially the designers thought that Park Place would be more of a tenant improvement project, rather than a major renovation.

"As we moved along, we realized the building was older than we expected in terms of the quality of maintenance," Garcia said. "It was the right decision to make upon the whole team to upgrade some of the systems in the building so it could last much longer."

Planning for a 20 to 30 year program lifespan for ASU, the team upgraded most of the mechanical and electrical systems, as well as the skin package.

"The building had concrete floors that were cantilevered out past the edge of the deck, and these formed pop-outs which were clad in metal trim and standing seam metal roofs," Elrod said. "We couldn't cut those floors off flush because we needed every square foot we could get in the building to provide the program for ASU."

"Our approach was to make order out of chaos," Garcia said. "We decided to lighten up the exterior skin by keeping very simple shapes - if there was a protruding object or bump-out, it became part of the language of the building."

Future plans for the campus include upgrades to make Taylor Street more pedestrian-friendly and a 200,000-sq.-ft., eight-story building for the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and KAET. "We are also targeting phase two of the College of Nursing on the pad just north of the existing Park Place building for the fall of 2008," Panetta said.

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