Ronald Reagan-UCLA Medical Center, Los Angeles

   Riding to the rescue: a novel by a stone supplier with ties to the client, and one of the first uses of a new anchoring system on any project in the United States.
   It’s not a fairy tale, either. It’s how travertine now graces the Ronald Reagan-UCLA Medical Center, slated to open later this year after a five-year construction schedule and an overall budget reaching $1 billion. 
   The state-of-the-art, eight-story (plus two basement levels), 525-bed hospital, situated in the midst of the university’s Los Angeles campus, is replacing the school’s Northridge facility, which was heavily damaged in a 1994 earthquake.
   Although a consortium of architects was brought in to design the project, Steve Achilles, who served as project manager for the New York-based Pei Partnership Architects, says he believes the firm was contracted to create the building’s envelope mainly because of the job’s high profile and location.
   “The hospital remains in need of private contributions to build the building, and people are more likely to be generous and open their pocketbooks when they have an assurance the building will be something of a landmark architecturally,” he says. “The hospital is important and a good cause, but being recognized as a very good building and a very high profile building definitely makes it easier to raise funds.”
   Along with its high profile, the location offered its own challenges. Situated on Westwood Boulevard, the new medical center serves as a transition between UCLA’s north and south campuses.
   “The south campus at UCLA is mostly medical, while the north campus is mostly academic,” says Achilles. “The south campus is newer, while the north campus is more traditional; the north campus is more masonry, more brick and more stone, while the south campus is more curtainwalls. The hospital design is something of an expressed attempt to mediate between the two. It’s a very modern version of the stone wall with plenty of metal showing.”
   When Achilles describes the building as a stone wall, he means it. In the early stages of design, famed architect I.M. Pei (who served as the design consultant) envisioned the building’s envelope as being primarily stone with glass-punched windows, which are expressive of the individual hospital rooms, lobbies and more general spaces.
   “In think because of his earlier experience, he had an idea that instead of having a conventional stone wall with grout joints, he wanted clearly expressed stone panels, individual pieces of stone mounted forward of an aluminum rainscreen wall, so each piece of stone is seen individually,” says Achilles. “That was an early idea that was never changed.”
   However, the search for just the right stone for the project evolved as the project moved forward. To facilitate the stone selection, Pei Partnership suggested UCLA hire Marc Heinlein, a well-known consultant with offices in New York, as well as an independent testing lab in Pietrassanta, Italy.
   “I was hired for all items affecting stone issues,” says Heinlein. “That included stone selection, prequalification of stones and manufacturers, specifications, and drawing review well before there was an award of a contract to a stone fabricator or installer.”
   His first step, assisted by Chien Chang Pei (one of  I..M Pei’s two sons, and a co-owner of Pei Partnership) and Achilles, was to review a large range of French limestones – including Spanish, Portuguese, German and North African, and Turkish limestones and travertines.
   However, in penciled out the cost, none of the stones appeared to meet the budget; at that point, there was also some suggestion that the project turn to precast concrete as a way to save money. Instead, the architects went back to work, making two major changes.
   “Looking at the stone costs, we decided to reduce the proportion of stone in the building and increase the proportion of aluminum curtain wall, which obviously brought the overall cost down,” says Achilles. “And, we asked Marc to begin suggesting some different travertines.”
   Achilles describes the search for a suitable travertine as lengthy, and one that involved the three men visiting various quarries throughout Italy. He says one early possibility was an unusual Tuscan travertine that had last been used for construction of the Milano Centrale train station in Milan, Italy.
   While the search was going on, the university gained the help and expertise of Carlo Mariotti. Mariotti, whose Tivoli, Italy-based Mariotti Carlo & Figli S.p.A. provides travertine for buildings worldwide, began lobbying to participate in the job.
   Mariotti also had a personal interest in the project; he was successfully treated for cancer at UCLA Medical Center in 1990 and returned for treatment of a different malignancy in 2001. (He passed away in 2004).
   Aware of the budget constraints under which the project was operating, Mariotti proposed a rarely used travertine called Ambra Light, which was ultimately accepted for the project.
   While helping the project’s bottom line, the use of the Ambra Light did present some problems for the architects and Benson Industries Inc., the Portland, Ore.-based manufacturer and installer of the facility’s curtainwall.
   From the architect’s standpoint, Achilles says the appearance had some drawbacks.
   “Because it’s full of very strong gray-green horizontal veining, in most applications it would be completely awful,” he says. “But, because of the gray aluminum behind it and the 2 ½” reveals between the panels, we hoped that we could tolerate the stripes in the stone.
   “I was apprehensive about the overall effect on the building. We were taking a real architectural risk. I was somewhat reassured when I discovered that when it bleaches, the gray and the green are the first to bleach out.”
   To maintain quality control of the project through the entire quarrying, fabrication and shipping process, Heinlein had a staff inspector at the factory and quarry on a continuous basis.
   “In addition to monitoring all quarry and factory production, material selection, dry-setting, panel identification, packing and crating, we provided frequent reports with block inventories, slab inventories and production/shipping inventories with extensive photographic back-up,” explains Heinlein.
   Even so, Achilles says he made at least two trips to Italy to deal with problems when the stone coming from the quarry didn’t match the approved range. In order to keep up with the production schedule, the range was opened on those occasions.
   Heinlein describes the problem as being one not so much of range as just needing reassurance that the selection and blending process remained on track. Even so, he says a blue vein that appeared in the stone was rejected, and toward the end of the project it became necessary to change quarry walls to maintain the proper separation and veining planes.
   “I felt like I was the only member of the team who was convinced this would work as long as we stayed within certain parameters,” Heinlein says.
   For Benson, the curtainwall manufacturer, a bigger issue was satisfying state regulators that the travertine’s anchoring system would meet Californian seismic requirements.
   Mike Flucke, senior vice president with Benson Industries, says his company became involved with the project after attending a preliminary review meeting with the architects. Although hospitals are not representative of the company’s work – the portfolio runs more to office buildings and condominiums – company officials liked what they saw.
   “It’s a very large, very custom curtainwall, and that’s our market niche,” says Flucke. “It’s also designed to be unitized (shop-assembled and hung from the floors of the building), which is the type of work we like to do. And we also like to work with the premier architects of the world, and certainly Pei Partnership and Perkins+Will are in that group.”
   The nature of the project, with the exposed reveals, meant that anchoring would have been a challenge regardless of the stone used.
   “Of course, the travertine tends not to have the strength of some other stones, so we did have to deal with the physical properties of the stone,” Flucke says. “However, because the design intent of the stone to appear like it’s suspended in front of the curtainwall, we couldn’t put shelf angles underneath it, or use any type of exposed anchors at all.”
   Several of those involved with the project were in Heinlein’s Italian office reviewing preliminary strength testing on the stone, and trying to determine what anchors to use when the consultant brought a sample of a new anchoring system to their attention. Known as the GSD plug back anchor, it’s a patented system designed by engineer Ennio Grassi of GS Engineering Srl in Avenza, Italy.
   “Corived assisted with the testing of this plug anchor during development and prototypes over an extended period of time before it was proposed for UCLA,” says Heinlein. “At that time, it was being used already in Europe and Asia and has since been successfully employed in the United States on other projects.”
   However, because the project is a hospital, the company had to contend with California’s Office of Statewide Health and Planning Development (OSHPD) that sets seismic requirements for all California health installations.
   “They may impose requirements on the wall that might not be apparent at the bid phase,” says Flucke. “They have the right to do that because their primary concern is public safety. As you go through the review process, if they’re concerned about something, they have the right to ask for additional testing and confirmation of the design.”
   Additionally, Flucke says the agency wasn’t terribly familiar with natural stone because it’s not a material officials are used to seeing in hospital construction. The end result was testing in Heinlein’s facility, and later at a testing lab in Oakland, Calif.
   It’s the only time the company has been asked to do seismic testing on stone anchors.
   “We used a lab that did pulsating and alternating sinusoidal seismic cycle testing on the plug anchors, rather than strictly on sheer and tension, like Marc did in his lab,” says Flucke. “We had to develop the testing for OSHPD, including full-sized testing on the stone with the anchors.”
   In all instances, the plug anchors performed exceedingly well.
   The company also did testing more common for curtainwalls, including a full-scale performance mockup of the curtainwall with the stone installed. That included structural testing for wind loads, air-and water-infiltration and seismic racking. The units were racked laterally up to four inches in each direction, Flucke says.
   Once the anchors received state approval, Mariotti Carlo & Figli began the process of quarrying and fabricating some 15,000 panels, each 41” X 41” X 1.57” (4cm). All surfaces then received fills with cement, and the front of the panels was finished in a low hone. Architect Achilles says the preference was to fill with cement rather than epoxy for durability.
   The fabricators were also responsible for drilling and installing the anchors, which are flush with the back of the stone. From there, the finished pieces were crated and shipped to Benson’s Portland manufacturing facility, where they were attached to the aluminum curtainwall panels, which were then sent to the Los Angeles job site for installation by a Benson crew.
   “One of the challenges for us is that they’re quite large panels,” says Flucke. “Because it’s a hospital, they have some very high floor-to-floor heights. On the lower floors we had units that were 22’ tall and one module (about 3’7”) wide. With the stone installed, they were quite large and quite heavy to work with.”
   Because of the nature of the job, Flucke says Benson won’t be done on the site until late this spring. Had the structure not been a hospital, he says construction and installation of the curtainwall would have taken about 18 months.
   However, both he and the architect are quite pleased with the look of the curtainwall as the structure heads toward completion.
   “The curtainwall design, the shop installation and the field installation have been excellent,” says Flucke. “It’s been a bit time-consuming, because of the stop-and-start nature of the hospital, but we knew that going in.”
   Pei’s Achilles says the Ambra Light travertine isn’t necessarily what the designers started with … but given the role cost played in the job, it’s turned out well.
   “We’re very satisfied and very, very pleased,” he concludes.

Client: University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), Los Angeles
Architects: Pei Partnership Architects, New York (design architect); Perkins+Will, Inc., Chicago (executive architect); Rocklin, Baron and Balbona, Los Angeles (architects of record)
Construction Management Services: The University Construction Management Team (Turner Construction, Co, Brentwood, Tenn., and URS Corp., New York)
Stone Consultant: Marc Heinlein, Corived Ltd., New York, and Corestone Srl, Pietrasanta, Italy
Stone Supplier: Mariotti Carlo & Figli S.p.A., Tivoli, Italy
Curtainwall Manufacturer: Benson Industries, Inc., Portland, Ore.

This article first appeared in the February 2005 print edition of Stone Business. ©2005 Western Business Media Inc.