It’s been maybe 50 years since sunshine warmed the earth under the cavernous multi-use room at the intersection of Middlefield Road and Ravenswood Avenue on the campus of Menlo-Atherton High School.
Critters under the old J Building are likely to be feeling the heat soon. Work has finally begun on a new performing arts center, which will be built on the site.
A crew is now removing materials such as asbestos from the building, Assistant Superintendent Ed LaVigne told the Almanac. A demolition crew will take over, probably the first week in August, to tear the building down.
In its place, the Sequoia Union High School District plans a 31,000-square-foot, 483-seat, $28 million theater, scheduled to open in mid-2009 and featuring a swooping exterior design that is likely to turn heads.
The city of Menlo Park will share in its use, having agreed to contribute $2.6 million, about 9 percent of the cost. The rest of the money is coming from $88 million in construction bond funds approved by district voters in 2001.
Angles and slopes
The M-A project got off to a celebrated start in June of 2005 when a design-competition jury gave the nod to Culver City-based Hodgetts + Fung Design and Architecture. The firm’s past work includes a canopy for the Hollywood Bowl and an 18,000-seat amphitheater for the Minnesota Orchestra.A scale model of the winning design is notable for its roof, a multi-level affair of several different angles and with downward sloping sections that seem to brush the ground.
Calling the design avant garde may not be out of place. It would seem to pass a test proposed to the competing architects in 2005 by then M-A vice principal and now Principal Matthew Zito: “This building has to be useful, but it also has to look good when you’re driving by at 35 mph in your Mercedes.”
At the original estimated construction cost of $17 million, the design may have seemed a bargain. The new $28 million figure reflects rising costs for labor and sharp rises in costs of materials, notably steel and concrete, Mr. LaVigne said.
To contain costs while preserving the theater’s practical and aesthetic values, the construction manager has been doing “value engineering.”
Cuts include lowering the seat count to 483 from 500 and more use of concrete block walls instead of poured concrete, Mr. LaVigne said.
M-A’s original plans called for an outer layer of copper on the roof that would have oxidized to verdigris. The new design is less dramatic: standing-seam metal at a savings of $600,000 to $700,000.
In keeping with a theatrical tradition, M-A’s stage crew will raise and lower scenic backdrops using sandbags and elbow grease.
Crews don’t break a sweat at this task at Woodside High School’s two-year-old theater — a $17 million, 500-seat venue that did not involve a design competition. A crew member can do the job with a mouse click from a laptop computer anywhere inside the theater.
Slow off the mark
Delays are seldom kind to a building’s price. In following required procedures, the Sequoia district had to wait six months for the Division of the State Architect to approve the theater’s engineering plans.The interval delayed the J Building’s demolition and may have raised costs by as much as $2.8 million, Mr. LaVigne said — a guess, he added.
Nat Chauhan, a regional manager for the Division of the State Architect, said the Sequoia district changed its plans during the approval cycle, which then had to be restarted.
In regulating K-14 public school construction, the state architect’s office requires districts to adhere to a separate building code called the Field Act. The Act’s specifications are more rigorous than the uniform building code, particularly concerning a building’s earthquake survivability.
When asked for an example of how the state changed the design, Mr. LaVigne noted the addition of 450 yards of concrete to the foundation at a cost of about $100,000. The state saw the school’s original specification as seismically unfit for M-A’s soil conditions, he said.
Such rigor is unnecessary, he said. “Since new buildings (built to the uniform building code) are not falling down on regular people, I can only conclude that the uniform building code is sufficient.”
