Spirit of the Centennial

UNM Engineering Center Opens its Doors to Students

By Scott Blair

The new home for UNM’s School of Engineering will provide 147,445 sq ft of space for classrooms, research and lab space. The attractive Spanish-revival structure surrounds an interior courtyard.

The Centennial Engineering Center’s opening this month fulfills a decade-long dream.

The building is comprised of four wings which surround a central courtyard. A large number of windows bring daylight into classrooms, offices and lab spaces. (Photo courtesy Bradbury Stamm)

The University of New Mexico’s School of Engineering has long needed a new home, and this new $42 million building on the main Albuquerque campus will replace a conglomeration of smaller, aging buildings. The new center was needed to consolidate all engineering disciplines in one place.

“Engineering is a contact sport,” says Joe Cecchi, the school’s dean. “We’ve got to have the latest facility to teach engineering and computer science.”

The building had been on the drawing board for almost 10 years when it finally broke ground in early 2007.

The lengthy genesis resulted in part because of construction cost escalations that changed the project from a two-phase project into a single phase.

That’s when construction costs for materials and labor began escalating.

“We get an entire new building, rather than constraining programs to fit into one half of the building,” Cecchi says. “There is a cost savings because we would have been walling off things and then coming back a second time.”

The school retained Albuquerque design firm Van H. Gilbert Architect, which partnered with Boston-based architect Shepley Bulfinch Richardson & Abbott, to design the 147,445-sq-ft structure. Albuquerque-based Bradbury Stamm Construction was selected as the general contractor under a $30 million construction contract.

The quadrangle-shaped building will provide students and faculty with modern classroom and research laboratories in four wings surrounding a central courtyard. Space will be utilized by the civil engineering department, a new biomedical engineering program and student support programs including the school’s minority engineering program.

The design facilitates interaction and collaboration between departments, and allows room to grow new interdisciplinary programs for the school. “Most problems in the world don’t divide conveniently into one engineering department, so the future is the ability to collaborate across the spectrum of engineering disciplines,” Cecchi says.

Designers balanced modern teaching concepts with the existing architectural style of UNM. “We’re trying to give a high-tech look to it, but it is very much a traditional UNM Building,” says Michael Hill, project manager with Van H. Gilbert Architect. “It picks up the UNM fabric of stucco and sloped, battered walls, but then there’s glass and metal solar shades.”

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The shoring and excavation removed 37,000 cu yds of material to roughly 18 ft below-grade. “Our shoring goes right up to where the site ends,” says Dan Lyons, project manager with Bradbury Stamm.

The foundation system is auger-cast concrete piles with pile caps and concrete grade beams. The four-story, structural steel building sits above one level below grade.

Steel erection began in the northwest corner. From there, the north and south wings were erected working from inside the building outwards. “Usually you’d set up a crane and move around the building, but due to site restrictions, we had the crane down inside the basement.” The exterior will feature EIFS, stucco and ample windows.

The complex mechanical design provides single-pass air for the labs and approximately 40 fume hoods. The north and south wings of the building will each have two large air handlers and exhaust fans.

The mechanical contractor, Albuquerque -based Miller Bonded, used building information modeling for their coordination and fabrication drawings, Hill says. After modeling the building in virtual space, Miller Bonded held a series of meetings with the owner, architect, general contractor and major subs to review the model for any clashes or collisions.

“While reviewing the 3d models for each area, we were able to adjust ceilings if necessary or move cable trays, and it eliminated a lot of potential change orders in the field,” Lyons says.

“We resolved approximately 95% of all collisions that would have otherwise happened in the field, which is a tremendous savings in labor and dollars on the project,” says Kent Bruner, Miller Bonded’s project manager.

Much of the piping, wiring and ductwork runs along the building’s corridors, allowing for access so that maintenance doesn’t require classroom interruptions for service, Bruner adds. “Some places are down to just inches to fit stuff into. Our computers can collision check from 6 in. down to .25 in. - we can get that finite if we need to.”

The labs will feature variable frequency drives so that air flow through the fume hoods can be throttled back when not in use, Hill says. “Energy consciousness and efficiency has been a total focus of the project from the get-go,” he adds.

To maximize efficiency, chilled water and steam are provided by two campus plants built by the university several years prior. “This goes hand in hand with the university looking years in the future back when they did [the plants],” Bruner says.

The exterior ties in with the existing style of the University, featuring a mix of straight and sloped, battered walls utilizing an EIFS system with stucco finishing. (Photo by Van H. Gilbert Architect)

Two monitors at either of the two main entrances will display the building’s energy consumption to students. “We want to bring the technology that is in the building to the attention of the building’s occupants, who are engineers,” Hill says. “They could use the buildings as one big experiment.”

Classes will begin in the new building on August 25th. “The contract date was actually in the middle of August for substantial completion, but that wouldn’t have been enough time for them to open on time,” Lyons says. “From the beginning we had a contingency in our schedule to push that up, and we actually gave them occupancy in mid-July.” The extra weeks particularly helped with the extensive set-up required for the labs.

After the building opens, there is still one task to complete: the demolition of the civil engineering department’s former building, which is located just nine ft from the new building’s southeast entry, Hill says. It was left in place for the department to use until the new building was completed.

Key Players

Owner: University of New Mexico
Architect: Van H. Gilbert Architect; Shepley Bulfinch Richardson & Abbott
General Contractor: Bradbury Stamm Construction
Engineers: Bridgers & Paxton Consulting Engineers; Bohannan Huston Inc.; McCormack Engineering
Subcontractors: Chaparral Electrical Contractors; Miller Bonded Inc.; Noel Company; Materials Inc.; Structural Services; W&W Steel

Useful Sources

Interested in the UNM School of Engineering? Visit their website for program information, research studies and more, at www.soe.unm.edu.

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