The Oklahoma City Museum of Art, housed in the Donald W. Reynolds Visual Arts Center, was built around, inside, and above the original Centre Theatre. The Centre Theatre, built in 1947, was downtown Oklahoma City’s last standing movie house. The 110,000 square-foot, $22.5 million, state-of-the-art Museum features 15 exhibit galleries, a 250-seat theater, a retail store, a café, a collections care center, a library/resource center, administrative offices, and educational/classroom space. A 55’ high glass sculpture, created by world-renowned glass sculptor Dale Chihuly, is permanently displayed in a three-story atrium located near the Museum’s entrance.
The renovation of the original structure required that the strengths and other engineering properties of the existing materials be determined and that the remaining portions of the structure be evaluated for current code criteria, including appropriate factors-of-safety. In those instances where the members did not meet all of the current code criteria, reinforcement solutions where developed to eliminate the deficiencies.
In the west addition, limited structural depth and column-free gallery spaces forced the 40” deep steel girders that span up to 70’ to be designed with web openings. These openings allowed the integration of other building systems to occur within the depth of the structure, rather than below the structure. Structural steel tubes, in lieu of vertical reinforcing bars, were placed in the corners of the concrete corewalls. This unique technique provided shearwall boundary steel without the need for pilasters, created simpler and more ductile steel girder connections at the corners of the corewalls, and eliminated some of the forming complexities in the concrete walls. The elimination of exterior pilasters on the corewalls was essential since these walls also function as exhibit space. A foundation system utilizing augered cast-in-place piles was selected because of its versatility in locations of limited headroom and its ability to limit vibrations that could potentially cause consolidation in the soils under the existing footings.
