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Los Angeles/Long Beach Market Report
Tudor-Saliba keeps crews busy with two high-profile projects – the Ronald Tutor Student Campus Center at USC and a clean-up job at the Port of Long Beach.
By Greg Aragon
Two Tudor Saliba projects -- the $102 million Ronald Tutor Student Campus Center in Los Angeles and the $67 million Pier A West clean-up project in Long Beach – are plowing ahead through tough economic times.
Located on the grounds of University of Southern California, the 151,000-sq-ft student campus center was designed by Los Angeles-based AC Martin Partners and is being built by Sylmar-based Tutor-Saliba Corp.
The project was made possible in-part by a $30-million donation from Ron Tutor, CEO and president of Tutor-Saliba.
“This is an exciting project for USC and I am proud to be a part of it,” says Tutor, a USC alumnus and lifelong Trojan fan.
When complete in December the facility will house a number of university centers, including the new Admission Center and the Epstein Family Alumni Center. There also will be student offices, study and multipurpose areas, meeting and board rooms, a full-service restaurant and cafes, convenience store and game and entertainment areas.
At the heart of the Campus Center will be a grand, 100- by 200-ft outdoor plaza for gathering and dining. The upper levels of the building will include open walkways facing the courtyard.
Architecturally, the L-shaped center will blend in with the current campus motif, says architect David Martin, president of AC Martin.
“The style is collegiate Romanesque, which most colleges of the 1920s and 30s followed and is characterized by red brick with limestone horizontal banding,” he says. “It matches [other] historic structures on the campus.”
The center, which broke ground in May 2008, is being built on the site of the Commons and the Topping Student Center, which were demolished when construction began.
South of USC, in the city of Wilmington, the Port of Long Beach is nearing completion on a $67 million project to clean up Pier A West, a 1950s oil field located northwest of the Terminal Island Freeway and the Cerritos Channel.
The 123-acre property was purchased by the Long Beach Harbor Department in 1994 from Union Pacific Resources Co. (now Anadarko). Soil and groundwater at the property had been contaminated by decades of oil production and industrial disposal.
“The port inherited a real environmental mess when it acquired this land as part of a larger purchase about 12 years ago,” says Robert Kanter, the port’s director of planning and environmental affairs.
“Through our voluntary agreement with the Department of Toxic Substances Control, we’ve been able to develop a coordinated plan to clean up the environmental pollutants and hazardous wastes and return the land to productive use.”
Led by Tutor-Saliba, along with Pennsylvania-based Weston Solutions Inc., the project consists of construction of three access roads and a parking lot and the remediation of 19 contaminated, below grade sumps.
Steel Puzzle:
East L.A. arts center resembles pyramid designed by Dali
By David Silva
When completed in May, the $66-million East Los Angeles College Fine and Performing Arts Center in Monterey Park will feature three cultural venues of strikingly unusual design and a world-class art collection from a Hollywood screen legend.
The 160,000-sq-ft project – part of a $700-million campus facelift funded by a series of bond measures -- will serve as headquarters for the college’s dance, fine arts, music and theater departments. Plans call for two L-shaped structures and a smaller, trapezoid-shaped structure framing a landscaped courtyard.
The larger of the L-shaped buildings is a two-story, 77,000-sq-ft, L-shaped recital hall featuring a 367-seat theater and facilities for painting, sculpture, dance and design studios. The other is a two-story, 42,100-sq-ft building containing a 325-seat theater, black-box theater and rehearsal and dressing rooms.
The smallest of the trio – one almost guaranteed to pop up on must-visit lists of both art and horror-film aficionados – is the three-story, 40,382-sq-ft Vincent Price Art Museum. Billed as “the first teaching art collection owned by a community college,” the museum serves as the permanent home for more than 2,000 works donated to the school by the legendary film actor and noted art connoisseur, who died in 1993.
Along with galleries for displaying Price’s art collection works, the facility includes a subterranean level for storing the actor’s treasures.
Jack McQuown, senior architect and construction manager for project architect Arquitectonica of Los Angeles, says finishing the center within the time frame provided by the Los Angeles Community District has presented a significant challenge. Arquitectonica and general contractor Taisei Construction Corp. of Cypress began construction in March 2008 and need to finish the entire job in 26 months.
“The construction phase on this is compressed, and that has required everybody to work hand in hand to keep this going,” says McQuown.
But perhaps the greatest challenge to the firms is the center’s eccentric structural design. With glass curtain-wall corners and sweeping steel spans skewed at angles that seem to defy gravity, the buildings resemble a pyramid complex as envisioned by Salvador Dali.
In a masterpiece of understatement, McQuown describes the structures as having “probably more structural steel than normal,” and looking “more unique than they really are.”
In fact, the buildings include 4,300 steel beams, braces and columns – about twice the usual amount for similarly sized structures. Just getting all those unusually shaped steel puzzle pieces in place was a story in itself, says Jack Santucci, senior project manager for Taisei.
“Throughout the project, we’ve had quite a few problems making the steel pieces meet,” Santucci says. “With the allowable tolerable and the height of the buildings, sometimes they just don’t meet, and then you have to come up with some creative solutions to fix it.”
The nine-campus Los Angeles Community College District is in the midst of a $5.7-billion construction and refurbishing effort. The Performing and Fine Arts Center is the largest building project at East Los Angeles College and the second largest in the college district.
The Project Team
Owner: Los Angeles Community College District
General Contractor: Taisei Construction Corp., Cypress
Architect: Arquitectonica, Los Angeles
Structural Steel Contractor: Adams Iron Co. Inc., Santa Ana
Steel Stud and Drywall Contractor: Platinum Construction, Dana Point
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