Who, what, when, where, why and how. Journalism’s Five Ws+H have become a major assignment for builders of a $425-million homage to the Fourth Estate in Washington, D.C. The content of the interactive museum, which has the media as its message, is meant to be “devoured” by “readers” section by section. But the form doesn’t only evoke a large-format newspaper. The glass press box on “Main Street USA” also is designed to resemble a television, a camera or a world stage. The architecture is so layered with symbolism that it is taking 24 structural systems and 11 exterior wall systems—with 12 types of glass—to support or display the various double, triple and quadruple entendres. That and the prime-time Pennsylvania Avenue site put the 550,000-sq-ft job’s builders, marching toward a July 1 finish, on parade.

©Sam Kittner/kittner.com

“It was hairy from time to time,” says  James S. Polshek, of the job’s New York City-based architect, Polshek Partnership LLP. “But we beat our way through the bulrushes,” he adds.

Polshek Partnership Architects Newseum intended to evoke a television, camera, newspaper and stage.

For the museum team, the answers to the Five Ws were an easy starting point. “Who” is the owner, the Arlington, Va.-based nonprofit called the Freedom Forum (FF), which is devoted to the First Amendment. “What” is the Newseum, which currently is in more humble circumstances in Arlington. “Where” is the last developable site on Pennsylvania Avenue, next to the Canadian Embassy; across from the National Gallery; and midway between the White House and the Capitol, which is in plain view. “Why” is the FF’s mission to promote free press, free speech and free spirit. “When” is next fall, when the Newseum’s doors open to society.

“How” was the head-scratcher—how to form the icon, with its many angles, layers and special effects. And the generous use of structure as architecture didn’t make things any easier. “It is a very involved building, with lots of interfaces,” says Daniel A. Sesil, partner-in-charge for Leslie E. Robertson Associates. New York City-based LERA is structural engineer for the building and the exhibits.

The job’s high profile didn’t help. “I had to get approval from 21 groups, including the Secret Service and the capital police, to shut down three lanes of Pennsylvania Avenue so we could assemble or move” the crawler crane, says Mac McIntire, project executive in the mid-Atlantic office of Turner Construction Co., Washington, D.C. Turner is construction manager-general contractor for the $238-million building, including interiors. “It took a whole morning to move the crane a few feet,” he adds.

Crane operations also had to be shut down at least 10 times for parades and protests and presidential motorcades. And in deference to nearby residences, crews cannot not start hammering until 7 a.m., instead of 6 a.m., or go later than 7 p.m.

Meetings with officials to work out deliveries of the prefabricated steel truss sections, trucked in from Canada, began eight months in advance. With the biggest piece 130 ft long and 16 ft deep, “the trucks were overweight, overwidth, and overlength,” says McIntire.

Adding more stress, the project hit the street during a building boom. “Nailing down costs is impossible even to this day,” says Polshek, who also is concerned about the quality of finishes because the labor pool is stretched so thin. “How many times can you reject shop drawings?” he asks.

Despite the restrictions, the building now is 70% complete and on time and on budget, reports the owner.

LERA News van exhibit was installed early

The 250,000-sq-ft interactive museum is designed to accommodate 1,500 visitors per hour. But there is more to the complex. Housing was a city requirement for the site, which the Newseum bought from the District of Columbia for $100 million—$25 million of which will be used for low-income housing elsewhere in town. In addition to 140,000 sq ft of condominiums, there is administrative space and below-grade parking. The museum will contain a 500-seat theater, two broadcast studios and 34,000 sq ft for exhibits designed by Ralph Appelbaum Associates, New York City. Exhibits include a memorial to journalists killed on assignment—their names will be etched in glass, a Berlin Wall guard tower, a news helicopter, a news van and the top 27 ft of the World Trade Center antenna. The Freedom Forum’s endowment is footing the bill, except for $73 million—mostly from media giants.

Polshek Partnership Architects

The building, which has a trapezoidal plan and steps up in height from 80 ft to 118 ft, has four main sections, largely rectilinear in shape. The first three house the Newseum and are interconnected by 11-ft-wide visitor circulation strips, steel-framed walkways and bridges covered in glass. The fourth section, framed in concrete, is the 12-story condominium. Washington is a concrete town, so the engineer used steel sparingly, mostly for long spans and open spaces.

The Newseum’s 252-ft-long and up-to 95-ft-tall “front page” is the most transparent. Passersby on the avenue will be able to watch a 50 x 32-ft news monitor, which hangs in section two, through an 80 x 60-ft picture window, supported using tensioned cables and vertical steel trusses. Interrupting the transparency is a 74-ft-tall, 52-ft-wide  tablet. Etched in the stone is the beginning of the First Amendment.

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Section two, though more dense, also is framed in steel except for a concrete core near the west end. The section contains a 157 x 42-ft lobby atrium with a 90-ft-high ceiling and three oversized, hydraulic elevator cabs, enclosed in glass.

Section three is framed in concrete. It contains exhibits, the theater, building services and offices.

“The building is packed with almost every conceivable structural system, in steel and concrete,” to respond to the design, the program and local market conditions, says LERA’s Sesil. The goal was to devise “intuitively simple and stand-alone systems” and minimize interdependencies “for the sake of construction,” he adds.

LERA Workers erect megatruss.

Four of the eight steel systems are architecturally expressed. The two most exotic are a bent column that doubles as a grand stair and a hollow, box megatruss, with expressed webs. There is an expressed Vierendeel truss, a cantilevered steel truss and two-way cantilever construction with torsional box beams.

For consistency, most expressed elements are made of steel plate assemblies, regardless of the structural system. “That meant one family of detail, one language” for the fabricator, says Sesil.

Two of the 12 concrete systems above grade are expressed. There is a post-tensioned beam column-load transfer system; a post-tensioned wall column-load transfer system; architectural concrete columns, architectural concrete beams—conventional and post-tensioned—and concrete core walls. Floor framing includes flat-plate construction; conventional beam and slab construction; one-way joist construction; post-tensioned flat-slab construction and a system of post-tensioned beams. The four-level, 45-ft-deep basement has four concrete foundation systems.

The most visually dramatic of all the structural systems is the 70-ft-tall bent column grand stair for it appears to have no visible means of support. The rationale...

...behind the cantilevered design was to avoid a column that would block a view of the Capitol, to the east.

The backbone of the stair is a series of eight, moment-connected bent steel box girders, 2.5 ft wide and 14 in. deep. The box girder continues 16 ft into the building, at each of four landings. The bent column is supported at its base on an 18-in.-deep, 12 x 14-ft reinforced concrete pad. The bent column supports one end of four stacked pedestrian bridges, 40 ft long and 12 ft wide, that link sections one and two.

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Turner Construction

The 252-ft-long, 39-ft-wide and 16-ft-deep megatruss, a hollow box that forms levels six to seven in section two, is not as dramatic looking as the grand stair, but it was much trickier to fabricate and erect. The megatruss consists of two prefabricated trusses with expressed web members, offset about 2 ft from the top and bottom chords, outside the box. The offset allowed the architect to hide the chords behind cladding and free the expressed webs of large bolts and plates, making them look cleaner and lighter.

The megatruss creates more column-free space in the exhibit areas above the atrium, as well as spans the atrium. Up to two floors of the museum are suspended from the megatruss via steel hangers. Bottom chords brace elevator towers.

Near the east end, each truss sits on an expressed steel column, 123 ft tall and 10.5-in. wide, braced at every floor. Near the west end, trusses land on two concrete shear wall towers, slightly offset. The clear span between supports is 148 ft. On the east, the megatruss cantilevers 48 ft; on the west, 36 ft.

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Turner Construction

LERA Megatruss called the "craziest" part of the project, but bent column stair (below, left) looks more dramatic. Crane assembly needed 21 approvals.

Webs are a series of plate assemblies that resemble hockey sticks. Each stick’s 8-ft-long tail, in line with truss chords, helps transfer loads to the truss and keep the connection clean, says LERA. Hockey sticks are connected to each other by sliding a two-pronged end of one over a single plate of the other, at its elbow. Each stick is pin-connected to the chord through a 2-ft-wide plate—the distance to the chord—that is 8 ft long—the distance along the chord.

Workers from Clark Foundation, Bethesda, Md., started Newseum foundations in May 2004. Once at grade, Turner started section four first and had workers “back out” of the hemmed-in site to avoid painting themselves into a corner, says McIntire. Also, the section-three frame was needed to brace the megatruss during erection.

During the more-complicated work, from May 2005 until last March, LERA had a surveillance engineer on site to troubleshoot, answer questions and offer insight to the contractor, especially regarding interfaces between steel and concrete systems.

LERA

McIntire calls the megatruss the “craziest thing we did” on the project. The large member sizes prompted steel contractor Canam/Structal to build a special assembly table, jig and fixtures at its Quebec City, Canada, fabrication plant. “Larger-than-normal truss members required very complicated fabrication tolerance calculations,” says Jacques Renaud, Canam’s project manager.

Truss prefabrication took two months, starting in October 2005. Canam made mock-ups for the expressed plate-to-plate welds. The design team made monthly visits to check accuracy. Because of the complexity of the truss, inspection was substantial due to the need to cumulatively measure chord distances and depths, says Renaud.

At the site, there was no room for truss section assembly. It really did not matter because each truss was too heavy to be lifted as a single piece, says Canam. The only alternative was mid-air splices.

Truss erection was so elaborate that Derr Steel Erection Co., Euless, Texas, started preparing nine months in advance. “The trickiest thing about these trusses is the eccentricity” from the hockey sticks, which are in a different plane from the chords, says Michael Kissane, a Canam onsite project manager. The hockey sticks threw the truss off balance, making it tend to lean over during erection, explains Kissane.

Shoring towers were not simple because the grade slab could not support them. The solution was to continue the towers down to the mat, through slab openings and a series of heavy structural frames. “LERA was worried about the concrete,” says James S. Kennedy, Derr’s senior engineer. “Every time I wanted to land lateral or gravity loads, to guy the truss or move the crane, they got really serious.”

Truss fit-up was difficult. McIntire says the engineer asked Derr to erect to 3⁄8-in. tolerance in any direction. “Derr said they couldn’t make it,” he says. “In most cases, we made 1⁄2 in.,” he adds.

In several locations, the camber was not exactly what it was supposed to be. “One splice at the very end took us a long time” and required jacking about an inch to get the correct camber, says Kennedy.

Turner Construction Engineers used steel to frame open spaces.

Steel erection began with the elevator tower frames below the future location of the megatruss, near its columns. Before megatruss erection could begin, the core towers had to be built to the underside of the trusses. After the shoring towers were installed, crews erected the    freestanding columns. They were also temporarily braced to the concrete structure.

Steel erection began last Jan. 4. Mainly using a 300-ton crawler crane with a 100-ft main boom and a 70-ft luffing jib, workers erected the west half of the megatruss first, beginning with the first two sections of the north truss and followed by the first two sections of the south truss. Still moving west to east, crews then erected the final two sections of the north truss, followed by one section of the south truss. Infill members followed. Shoring remained until crews had erected the structure in section one, which braces the  columns. Falsework came out March 31.

The truss will continue to deflect until the hanging floors and other construction is complete. But “all deflections to date are reasonable,” says LERA’s Sesil.

Because of the Newseum’s mission,  the job for most of the building team has extra significance. “This building has to rise into the top 1% of anything I...have been responsible for in 45 years,” says Polshek.

LERA	LERA
Exhibits include WTC antenna, left, still in storage and Berlin Wall guard tower installed early.

That resonates in a more direct way for LERA, a successor firm to the original design engineer for the WTC and the WTC’s building engineer until its destruction on Sept. 11, 2001. LERA engineer Richard Garlock helped find the piece, to be installed in May, in the ruins of Ground Zero. “Having the antenna display is important to us at LERA,” says Douglas P. Gonzalez, LERA’s Newseum project manager. “Many of us climbed that antenna tower to do inspections.”

Newseum president, Peter S. Pritchard, thinks there is something important about the museum for all Americans, whether or not they have a direct connection to the project, an artifact or both. “This is the museum for the ages,” he says. “The value of a free press and independent media is more important than ever, especially since most Americans take the First Amendment for granted.”