Wisconsin Builder | Top Projects of 2002

Engineering Excellence

Cullen beats the elements for UW center

Engineering Centers Building Madison

By Sean Ryan

Who built the University of Wisconsin Engineering Centers Building in Madison smashed stubborn rock, weathered record snowfalls and made their building stand on crooked pillars.

It took more than two years to build the 229,000-square-foot Engineering Centers Building, which has classrooms, two lecture halls, chemistry labs and sterilized clean rooms much like those in which computer chips are manufactured.

"There was a great degree of cooperation and problem solving, which was the only reason it got done," said Dan Swanson, project management vice president for general contractor J.P. Cullen & Sons Inc., Janesville. "The first challenge was digging a big hole."

Crews spent the summer of 2000 unearthing 20,000 square yards of rock and 40,000 square yards of dirt for the building's foundation. Crews couldn't dynamite the rock, so Cullen shipped in a drill from a local quarry to bore holes in the stone so backhoes could crack into it.

"Because we weren't allowed to blast, it was a tough time ripping into that hard rock," Swanson said.

Weathering the storm

The 34-foot-deep hole was dug before winter came, leaving workers the formidable job of pouring foundation concrete — which wasn't completed until May — in the heaviest snowfall Wisconsin had seen in years. Swanson said they piled snow into insulating blankets and used the tower crane to clear them off site each morning.

Project Name: Engineering Centers Building
Location: Madison
Submitting Company: J.P. Cullen & Sons Inc., Janesville
General Contractor/Construction Manager: J.P. Cullen & Sons Inc., Janesville
Architect: Flad and Associates, Madison
Engineer: Flad and Associates, Madison
Owner: State of Wisconsin
Project Cost: $43 million
Start Date: June 2000
Completion Date: August 2002

"By the time you had one snowfall picked up you had another coming, and that was all winter," he said. "Because of the record snows in January 2001, we had a lot of problems because we were in the middle of the concrete framing. You had to shovel the snow and then pour and then cover it up again."

The state granted Cullen a month's schedule extension to cover time lost to the snow, and although piecing the building together presented a whole new gamut of challenges, Swanson said the team stayed on schedule from that point on.

"The third significant challenge was the tilted columns and the arched roof," he said. "There was a significant amount of work with making the structure, the glass and window system, the roofing system and the precast concrete panels all line up and hit the same point."

The building design called for some support columns to be angled, rather than perpendicular to the ground, creating a slew of design irregularities. Swanson said Cullen's subcontractors and fabricators constantly traded computer graphics of the building in order to make everything line up properly.

"One of the column lines was not only at a diagonal to the rest of the building, but it was also tilted," he said. "I don't think you could've done any of this by hand. It wouldn't have been possible."

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