Turning Imagination into Reality

RodgersHardin Uses Concrete Skills to Build New Children's Learning Center

By Bea Quirk

ImaginOn: The Joe & Joan Martin Center, which is being built in uptown Charlotte will feature a variety of programs using the written, spoken and electronic word to produce an interactive learning environment where young people will be able to explore new ideas and have their creative potential nurtured.

So it's only fitting that the architect of record, Charlotte-based Gantt Huberman Architects, created a highly imaginative design for the 102,000-sq.-ft. facility set to open in early October.

"With its bright colors and many different shapes, it reflects the playfulness of youth," said Bruce LaRowe, executive director of the Children's Theatre of Charlotte. The theater company is partnering with Mecklenburg County and the Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County on the project, part of uptown Charlotte's burgeoning cultural district. Of the $41 million budget, $27 million comes from bonds approved by county voters in 1999.

The building's design flair and whimsy also posed a multitude of challenges for general contractor RodgersHardin, an alliance between Rodgers Builders of Charlotte and Hardin Construction Co. of Atlanta. The team has been involved in the project since July 2002 and started construction in April 2003. It turned the building over in May, when the interior upfitting began.

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The complexity of construction began with the building's basic structure: a parallelogram full of curves and shapes such as helixes, ellipses and pentagons. There aren't many square corners. One side of the building is 10 ft. higher than the other, and although the structure is two floors, it has six different elevations.

The roof slopes in two different directions. Because of that, a laser level had to be used to ensure that the height of the 50 supporting columns was exact so the roof was pitched correctly.

"We were doing geometry problems in the field to make sure everything fit together," said Rich Rosenthal, the library's chief of operations who acted as project manager and owner's representative for the project. Although the library and Children's Theatre are working as partners, the library owns the facility and the theater is a tenant.

"It was like fitting each individual piece of the project together like a puzzle, and we had to micromanage every detail," said Matt Connolly, senior project manager for RodgersHardin. He added that field engineers remained onsite longer than usual to ensure the accuracy of all the work.

Concrete pours were often broken down into 13- to 15-ft. elevation breaks, and they were scheduled on a daily basis.

"It was a complex concrete job," Connolly said. "No individual wall pour was simple. Each one was different, and we mapped each one out individually."

The concrete work was so complicated that RodgersHardin chose to self-perform that part of the job, turning to Mid-Atlantic Construction, which is owned by Pat Rodgers, president and CEO of Rodgers Builders. "We saved a lot of money that way, and it gave us more control so we could ensure the quality and make sure it was done right," Connolly said.

But ImaginOn is made of a lot more than concrete. Unusual materials have been used, and traditional ones are used in nontraditional ways. Plastic lathe is used in the ceiling. All the exterior materials - which include glass, aluminum and tile - are continued inside.

A block-long glass wall is interrupted by a series of two-story-high, brightly colored tile boxes. A red granite tower featuring a ramp, story-telling area and production studio sits across from a 550-seat theater, featuring an exterior wall of standing-seam metal (usually a roofing material) that dramatically juts out in a large circular shape from the wall. The metal is used for the interior wall as well.

All this was done on a four-acre urban site on one city block. Rosenthal said a number of other factors also had to be dealt with, such as contaminated materials (from previous uses), unstable soils, rock, a high water table and zoning requirements mandated by the city's Urban Mixed Use Development ordinance, which regulates such aspects as pedestrian access, landscaping and parking.

Because of that last requirement, an 86-car garage is included under the building.

The design team also decided to make ImaginOn the first official "green" building in Mecklenburg County, and RodgersHardin is seeking Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design Silver Certification from the U.S. Green Building Council.

To qualify, recycled materials needed to be used as much as possible. In ImaginOn, that included tile and aluminum in the exterior structure, wheat stock for the cabinets and granite wastes from South Dakota left over from manufacturing cemetery headstones.

Three-quarters of the construction wastes have been recycled instead of going into a landfill. "We didn't have to pay fees to use the landfill, and we got money back from recycling the steel," Connolly said. "From now on, we will recycle wastes at all our projects."