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Sited prominently between the National Air & Space Museum and the U.S. Capitol, the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian on the National Mall opened on September 21st to much acclaim. The facility is a centerpiece venue for ceremonies and presentations, as well as a primary exhibition space for Indian arts, histories and cultures. A joint venture of Clark Construction Group, LLC (www.clarkconstruction.com) and Table Mountain Rancheria Enterprises Inc. of Friant, Calif. served as general contractor on the 250,000-square-foot structure.
“Visitors will leave this museum experience knowing that Indians are not a remnant of history. We are still here and making vital contributions to contemporary American culture and art,” says W. Richard West Jr., the museum’s founding director.
The five-story curvilinear building is made of Kasota limestone that evokes natural rock formations and is set in a four-acre landscaped site that includes a wetlands area and more than 40 boulders known as “grandfather rocks.” The building’s special features - an entrance facing east toward the rising sun, a prism window and a 120-foot high entrance called the Potomac - were designed in consultation with many Native Americans over a four-year period.
A welcome wall electronic photomontage greets visitors in 200 Native languages, conveying the significant presence and diversity of Native peoples throughout the Americas. This message is again reinforced in the Lelawi Theater, a 120-seat circular theater located on the fourth floor that features a 13-minute multimedia experience that prepares museum visitors for their tour.
One of the most complicated aspects of building the project was the formwork. Clark Concrete, a subsidiary of Clark, self-performed 100% of the concrete work.
There are six footprints, undulating perimeter walls, real boulders and constructed water features and a 45-meter entrance overhang reminiscent of age-old cliff dwellings. The museum is designed to resist seismic and wind loads, primarily by transferring loads to the shear walls of the stair and elevator cores placed throughout the building to withstand live loads of as much as A8 kN/m2.Indian, cont.)
A prominent architectural feature of the museum is a roof that cantilevers above the entrance at the eastern end. Most of the building is built from reinforced concrete, except the eastern portion of the fifth floor, which has a steel frame. A steel truss framing system was selected because it is easier to construct and reduces unbalanced loading on the support cores. Friction-resistant driven piles of epoxy-coated steel support the structure. The H310-section piles are driven 15-meters into the bearing strata to attain the design capacity. A total of 1,050 piles support the structure.
No two floors utilize the same geometric layout, and the design contains many compound curves and changing radii throughout the building. There are more than 500 work points, each of which represent the center of a circle and can generate multiple radii. Within the building, there are easily over 1,000 curves and little repetition.
The Polshek Partnership of New York, SmithGroup of Washington, D.C. and Jones & Jones of Seattle designed the museum. Other project team members included Cosentini Associates of New York, mechanical /electrical engineer; Severud Associates of New York, structural engineer; EDAW, Inc. of Alexandria, Va., landscape architect.
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