Floating a Building and Deepening a Site: How Strategic Decisions and Strong Collaboration Ensured the Success of a Complex Project

The new home of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive combines a challenging adaptive reuse project with a unique auditorium addition. Located on a tight parcel of land in downtown Berkeley, California, the site is bounded by three city streets, an operating bank, an occupied apartment building, and an existing parking garage. The architectural and structural scope on the project necessitated an elaborate suite of shoring systems to facilitate the downward and outward expansion of the existing facility on the site, including soldier beams and tiebacks, soil nail walls, concrete buttresses, braced-frame buttresses supported on drilled piers, hand-mined underpinning piers, and hydraulic jacking of steel support structures. The final design package reflected flexibility from the design team and versatility from the contractors, keeping all options open and ensuring the right shoring systems would be used in the right places.