Glenview
Naval Air Station Redo
Glen Town Center Cleared for Takeoff
by Jeffrey Steele
One of the biggest logistical headaches at the Glen Town
Center project in Glenview, Ill., was the need to keep hundreds
of workers functioning efficiently in a constrained area overrun
with trucks and construction work.
"It's a very condensed project, with a lot of square
footage and a lot of buildings," said Tom Miller, vice
president of development for Chicago-based Transwestern Commercial
Services, the construction manager on the project. "On
any given day I could have 300 trucks coming in and off this
site for deliveries."
He added that it was necessary to manage more than 1,200 workers
onsite, as well as trucks and deliveries, and still be able
to give the general contractors proper access to their individual
sites.
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The $150 million Glen Town Center project is on a 48-acre
site in the center of the 1,200-acre redevelopment of the
old Glenview Naval Air Station. San Diego-based OliverMcMillan
is serving as the property developer, and the firm is a part
owner of property in the development, along with the village
of Glenview.
The project will encompass 13 restaurants, 50 stores, 155
townhouses and apartments in more than a dozen structures.
This includes a 150,000-sq.-ft. Von Maur department store,
an 80,000-sq.-ft. Galyan's sporting goods store, a 10-screen
movie multiplex and two large mixed-use retail-apartment buildings.
In total, 2,533 public parking spaces will be located in the
Glen, in garages and elsewhere throughout the development,
Miller said.
Groundbreaking took place in late summer 2002, with the grand
opening of retail and parking garages taking place this month.
Wood Dale, Ill.-based George Sollitt Construction oversaw
two major parking structures, Chicago-based Pepper Construction
Co. handled the sitework and Von Maur and Galyan's stores
and Minneapolis-based Weis Builders managed mixed-use buildings,
some retail tenants and limited parking, said Don Owen of
the village of Glenview.
While some townhouses are already occupied, the remainder
of them and the apartments won't be complete until March or
April.
Design Embraces Diverse Styles
Diversity was the goal in the choice of architectural styles
and construction materials used in the retail center.
"We pretty much cover the gamut," Miller said. "We
have wood construction, steel and wood, precast concrete, cast-in-place
concrete, steel frame. The architects were different from building
to building, and the end product is equally different. When
you see it, you sense that it's like a small urban city built
all at the same time."
Two of the most interesting components of the center are the
pair of mixed-use buildings incorporating basement-level parking,
ground-floor retail and second and third-story luxury apartments,
Miller said. These buildings had to be designed and built to
allow for future requirements of ground-floor commercial tenants.
That meant running 64 rated shafts from the first floor through
the roof of the structures to serve as "means and methods"
to install future tenant improvements.
For example, if a restaurant tenant were to need a duct installed
sometime in the future, the 2- by 5-ft. rated shafts would allow
the ductwork to be added without compromising any of the apartments
through which the duct would travel.
"Once we established the ground rules, we were able to
fit the apartments around [the shafts] quite easily," said
Timothy Kent, project manager with Chicago's Pappageorge Haymes
Ltd., the architectural firm that designed the mixed-use buildings.
And the sanitary lines that feed the buildings' grease traps
were installed in the ground. They were piped into the base
of the buildings, which will allow future restaurant tenants
to tie into the line without undertaking expensive excavation
at the site, Miller said.
"Preplanning was the key," he added. "You have
to think this through all the way before you finish the base
building, the shell. The alternative is to double and triple
the cost by doing extra work afterward."
Pappageorge Haymes Ltd. faced other obstacles in designing the
two buildings, Kent said. One was that the buildings had to
be curved, which meant they couldn't be constructed in modular
fashion. Most of the units are different from one another, making
the production of construction documents and the construction
itself difficult, Kent added.
The buildings also use different construction systems, including
cast-in-place concrete for basements, precast concrete for first-floor
decks, steel with a composite deck for second floors and wood
on third floors and roofs.
"During the initial pricing phase, that was deemed to be
the less expensive route, but it made for a more complicated
design phase," Kent said.
There also was a high water table to deal with. Just east of
the Glen is the 20-ft.-deep "detention basin" for
the 1,200-acre development. Because of the number of acres involved
and Glenview's relative flatness, the storm sewers had to be
dug deep to reach all buildings throughout the site. At its
low end, the storm sewer is 20 ft. deep and empties directly
into the adjacent detention pond.
"When you go that deep, you get to the point where you're
at the same elevation as the lake," Miller said. "Even
in standard conditions, the water table is quite high on the
site, so we had to do quite a bit of dewatering before the
storm sewer and buildings could be built."
Incorporating Special Needs
Von Maur and Galyan's had their own program requirements,
meaning the retailers not only designed how their interior space
would look but how the buildings themselves would look.
"Typically, the shell architect designs based on estimates
of what may happen in that space, and the retailer has his own
architect for the build-out," Miller said. "But that
base building may not meet the needs of the tenant occupying
that space, so you end up making modifications in the building
to accommodate the tenant."
Miller said he coordinated the needs of the tenant architect,
base building architect and the MEP contractors. In addition,
he had to deal with contradictions between what the tenant required
and the leases called for.
Has Hangar from 1920s
Not all the retail buildings are new. One of the structures,
an aircraft hangar, is the oldest on the property, having been
built even before the U.S. Navy acquired the airfield in the
late 1930s. This historic hangar building is being seen as a
kind of centerpiece of the Glen, and it will house a bookstore,
cosmetics shop and other stores.
Bernie Woytek, an associate with Chicago-based Gensler, the
architectural firm responsible for the renovation of the hangar,
said the building is a historic landmark built during the 1920s
when the airfield was a privately owned, independent flight
school. It remained on the property after the field became the
Glenview Naval Air Station.
"Because it was a registered historic building, we needed
to go through the state's historic preservation office,"
Woytek added. "The original hangar consisted of five large
bays, one of which has been maintained. The front of the hangar
had some masonry structures that were like the front door. They
have been maintained and refurbished and incorporated into the
retail storefront."
When Glen Town Center is finished, designers believe it will
remind visitors and residents of the downtown areas of older
Chicago suburbs and will boast a decidedly pedestrian feel.
"The goal of the architecture for these buildings was to
recall the main street experience in other North Shore communities,
such as Winnetka and Lake Forest, and to evoke that kind of
architecture," Kent said. That meant the inclusion of such
design features as gable roofs, abundant masonry and a variety
of window shapes, sizes and colors. It also meant tucking parking
lots behind buildings and avoiding setbacks to give streets
a lively pedestrian orientation. |
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