Museum of Anthropology renewal, Vancouver, BC
On June 13, 2024, Arthur Erickson’s beloved Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia reopened after 18 months of closure. During this time, its iconic Great Hall was entirely rebuilt from the ground up. The epic reconstruction was steered by Vancouver architect Nick Milkovich, whom Erickson first hired in 1968 and who worked on the original building.
Here’s Milkovich’s account of the project, drawn from an interview with Adele Weder.
Since the Museum of Anthropology was built, the knowledge of earthquake impact has changed; the building was about 25 per cent of what it should be for current codes. The building was already showing signs of deterioration: the plastic skylights leaked like hell, steel reinforcements in the concrete were starting to show, things like that. The Great Hall was the worst off.
We started out by scanning the building components. That’s when we discovered that the concrete columns were actually hollow. Fifty years ago, the lifting capacity of the construction equipment was more limited; it would have been difficult or impossible to raise the largest column, which was 50 feet high. So that’s probably why they were thinned out and hollowed. The engineering consultant had said that it would come down fast in an earthquake—and that’s before we found out that the columns were hollow!
When we found out that it was that bad, we thought it would be really difficult to reinforce it without showing a lot of steel, but doing it that way would have changed the whole character of the building.
The key to the seismic upgrade is what’s called base isolation, so the building can move in an earthquake. The old structure was slab-on-grade concrete, resting directly on the ground. We rebuilt it with precast concrete, with a crawl space under the building and a huge beam under the columns that helps supports it.
And underneath every column, we incorporated rubber-and-steel tips called base isolators. They’ll act like shock absorbers in an earthquake. Our projection is that the building will be able to move up to one foot two inches, in two or three seconds. That was the big move.
The existing walls were tempered glass, which wouldn’t break into deadly shards—but in an earthquake, all that glass would all
instantly shatter and pile up on the ground at the foot of the building. We replaced that glass with laminated sheets of glass, which are stronger and still safe.
Before, the glass plates were pinned to the columns and hung from the beams. Now, long plates of glass are cantilevered over the columns a bit, meeting at the vertical glass plates at a right angle, caulked together with a steel rod in the middle of the caulking, and that
allows for a bit of movement in an earthquake.
I hesitated for about a week before I took on the job. I’m not a huge political animal; I’m just a guy who likes to make things. I had to decide if I could handle the politics of it all. But I knew I could handle the architecture part, and I knew the building well.
And I realized too there was an obligation—a moral obligation, in a way.
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