Project Description: The New de Young Museum, located in Golden Gate Park is comprised of a 250,000 square feet of exhibit hall and gallery area as well as a one of a kind, stand alone 9 story tower. The footprint of the tower at the basement level through the 4th floor is just 3,400 square feet, but increases slightly ever floor as the rectangular floor plate skews into an continually increasing acute parallelogram up through the 9th floor until it reaches 4,000 square feet.
This structure is very unique in both its appearance and design. The exterior of the main exhibit building and the tower are clad in copper panels. To provide the attachment of the panels to the building it was necessary to embed numerous anchors and structural steel plate at the perimeter of both structures. Accurate layout and installation of these embeds were essential to facilitate erection especially at the tower because of its twisting distortion of the upper levels.
Due to the small floor plate, the overall building height and the off-set loading of the upper floors the structural engineers had to be creative when designing the vertical shear elements as well as working with the architects to maintain the desired architectural features. The bottom four levels of the tower are completely surrounded by perimeter walls, but the angled core wall continues up through the roof. The sandblasted “class A” tower walls had to maintain a specific tie pattern which was often times difficult especially at the lower levels where the vertical reinforcing was extremely congested. In addition to the extensive reinforcing steel the shear walls at each end of the structure running in the short direct also required vertical postensioning elements to resist overturning as the walls projected out over the previous levels as the building progress up from the 4th floor.
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