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Paul Nassetta doesn’t retire well, he says.
After finishing his career as director of operations at contractor Hoffman and Associates in Washington, DC, Nassetta returned to the workforce in 2018 as director of design and construction at Johns Hopkins University.
In his new role, Nasetta was tasked with delivering a challenging project: transforming the recently shuttered Newseum just blocks from the US Capitol into a state-of-the-art higher education centertogether with the general contractor Clark Construction.
Dedicated last month, the $300 million JHU Bloomberg Center is a 10-story, 350,000-square-foot academic building on Pennsylvania Avenue that includes 38 classrooms, a lounge-style library, a multimedia studio, study spaces informal, a theater with 375 seats. , a conference center, a banquet hall, a gym and a roof terrace.
The project team began designing the Bloomberg Center in the spring of 2019 with a strict opening deadline of the fall semester of 2023.
The quick timeline and unique construction limitations preventing any use of a crane would be a tall order. Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit, causing supply chain disruptions and material prices to soar.
Fortunately, this did not hold the project team back.
“This is a project that, under normal conditions, would have taken another year to build,” said Matt Vaughn, project executive for Bethesda, Md.-based Clark. “But given the constraints, we worked with Johns Hopkins and the design team to create a phased design sequence that allowed us to begin demolition and construction a full year before the overall design was completed.”
Because work began in earnest even before architects Ennead, Rockwell Group and SmithGroup finalized designs, Vaughan said Clark and Johns Hopkins secured and locked in a third of the project’s costs before COVID hit, which ended up partially protecting the job from inflation.
Careful work
The Newseum, which opened in 2008, had a massive atrium containing a helicopter and a suspended jumbotron, as escalators and platforms guided visitors around the perimeter, showing aspects of the history of journalism and the evolution of media.
This didn’t exactly translate into a college building.
“We had to tear out almost every floor below the eighth level,” Nassetta said. “And so, to do that and keep the building stabilized, we had to put a million pounds of temporary steel in the interstitial spaces where the new floors weren’t going to go.”
The Newseum in 2014. It opened in 2008 and closed in late 2019.
As crews demolished areas below the eighth floor to replace them, they had to remove broken material and insert temporary support steel for the upper floors. However, due to the complexity of the design, the roof of the building had to remain intact.
“And that means that, unlike almost every other complex construction project in the country, this project would have to be built without the use of a crane that delivers materials from the air,” Vaughn said.
Instead, crews had to remove the glass facade that faced busy Pennsylvania Avenue to transport materials in and out and make room for the work.
Lack of uniformity
To update and expand the building’s elevator bank, Nassetta said, the project team built a box around the existing elevators, where concrete subcontractor Miller and Long poured shotcrete around the reinforced steel to fit the space. Essentially, crews built a concrete tube, then demolished the elevator work inside and removed the materials without a crane to build a new elevator space, all while working around the tons of steel storm.
The new exterior of the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg Center in Washington, DC
Courtesy of Johns Hopkins University
“It was quite a challenge,” Nassetta said.
The new performing arts space is being built on the site of the original Newseum theater, which projected IMAX and 4D experiences, not what Johns Hopkins needed. The team had to remove a major post-tensioning beam and cables, which meant crews used large hydraulic jacks to lift the building to remove the beam, replace it and reduce the theater from 535 to 400 seats
Vaughn said the project’s lack of uniformity posed the biggest challenge for crews. In many similar jobs, workers begin to understand the structure and rooms or stairs are repeated, which creates familiarity from day to day. In the Johns Hopkins project, there was little repetition.
“And as a result, all the craftsmen when they built the room’s staircase, they could become experts in the conditions of level five of the room’s staircase, but these conditions would never happen again because at level four or three, the room the staircase would do something completely different,” Vaughn said. “And that just meant that our contractors had to be especially prepared to keep building under these unique conditions.”
The number of workers on the project reached more than 700 a day, Nassetta said. At first, the project began six days a week, before obtaining special permits to work 24/7, which were needed to deliver the project on time.
Vaughan said the challenging nature of construction is exactly what drew Clark’s team to the project. As for Nassetta, who was asked if she will get better in retirement, she said: “No. I mean, I like to be busy.”
