University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) resides in a new home on the site of the former University of California, Berkeley printing facility. Degenkolb was retained by general contractor Plant Construction Company to serve as the construction means and methods engineer on the project, assisting Plant with carrying out a challenging adaptive reuse to convert the 1930s era facility into an 83,000 square foot world-class museum.

Degenkolb’s scope included the design of approximately 900 linear feet of shoring bulkhead with retained heights of up to 30 feet, incorporating multiple shoring systems including soldier beams and tiebacks, soil nails, concrete buttresses, and hand-mined underpinning pits. Each side of the site possessed unique shoring challenges, including adjacencies to city streets, occupied buildings, and high construction surcharges, and Degenkolb used deliberate decision making to select the proper shoring systems for each location. Degenkolb also developed an underpinning scheme to temporarily “float” the three-story concrete office tower on the site while 75 percent of its existing footings were undermined to facilitate a deeper basement beneath. Degenkolb developed a detailed hydraulic jacking sequence to transfer load between the existing building’s foundation elements and a temporary steel underpinning structure to prevent differential displacements in the building and ensure that the project’s strict deflection requirements would be met.

Features:

• Design of approximately 900 linear feet of shoring bulkhead with retained heights of up to 30 feet
• Development of an underpinning scheme to temporarily “float” the three-story concrete office tower on the site while 75 percent of its existing footings were undermined to facilitate a deeper basement beneath