The skyline of downtown Los Angeles has long been restrained by statutes requiring flat rooftops and the looming catastrophe in the back of every Angeleno’s mind: an earthquake. Recent changes to local laws and the continued revitalization of the historic core have paved the way for an impressive new development to challenge those limitations — the new Wilshire Grand Hotel. When complete, LA will boast a 1,100-foot tower with a sail-shaped top, standing out and far above any other building on the West Coast.
© AC Martin
The bold, unprecedented design from renowned firm AC Martin Architects called for new and innovative technologies to coordinate the collective expertise of Turner construction, consulting engineers, and numerous general contractors. All of the teams worked together with Bluebeam’s advanced PDF software, Bluebeam Revu, which allows for instant editing and collaboration, to create a stable icon for a landscape that can change in an instant.
AC Martin principal David Martin developed the massive structure’s initial plans with an airy and natural feel, calling for a slender corner tower with an innovative concrete core. A stunning skylight “river” of 475 glass panels, referencing the cascades of the Yosemite Valley, connects the tower’s office and hotel space to a podium entryway on the ground floor. Meanwhile, the tower itself will feature 43 floors of hotel rooms tapering off in size toward the dramatic top spire.
Under any circumstances, this design would require forward thinking to properly arrange the space and internal structures. But in California, every bit of concrete, glass, wiring, and plumbing needed to contribute to the light and breezy design while also realistically swaying several feet in any direction without collapsing from winds or fault line rumblings.
Consulting engineer Leonard Joseph with Thorton Thomasetti explained that these elements made it challenging to analyze the building’s expected behavior in a simulated seismic event. “For buildings that have unusual structural systems or shapes,” Joseph says, “the expectation might be unrealistic. In that case you can have a gut feeling that some things might not work well together, but you can’t tell the architect, ‘We don’t think it will work.’ You have to be able to prove it.”
Working with 3D digital models to thoroughly test the building’s capacities and prove any insufficiencies led his team to make continual adjustments to the design. Revisions called for phantom openings, odd-shaped doorways, and a substantial seismic joint at the base that will allow an occupied weight of 330 million pounds to tilt and shake up to seven feet.
With each slight adjustment, there were major implications. Turner Construction, Pan Pacific Mechanics, and ACCO Electrical all had to coordinate their teams internally as well as with each other to ensure every new feature would fit. “Anything that crosses between the two structures,” Turner Engineer Daniel Sistrunk says of the building’s podium and seismic joint, “including the main electrical service, the main mechanical piping, many storm drains, and other plumbing lines — has to take into account that differential movement.”
To keep all of the teams on the same page throughout a design process that evolved over several years, the contractors and designers leveraged Bluebeam Revu, which allows for these complex 3D mockups made in Revit, AutoCAD, Navisworks, and other programs to be easily turned into 2D and 3D PDF files allowing for color-coded markups. With the added bonus of Bluebeam Studio, Revu‘s integrated cloud-based collaboration tool, everybody on every team could examine the files in Studio Sessions as soon as they were ready and quickly manipulate them for real-time collaboration or access files from Studio Projects which functions as a simple document management system.
“We use Revu to turn our shop drawings into a dynamic set of documents that we can distribute to the Fabrication shop and Field Staff using Bluebeam Studio Projects,” says Dan Watts, the BIM lead at PPM, “using iPads and tablets in the field, our workers can access our drawings from anywhere on demand … Studio Projects helps keep us organized and everything in one place. I rarely get the question ‘Where did you put that drawing again?’”
This connectivity allowed the huge number of contractors, designers, and engineers — all of whom were working to protect the Wilshire Grand against catastrophe — to have the same documents in front of them at all times. It also eliminated the need for long email chains or possible internal confusion. Every device with Revu could have access to just one drawing set with all the necessary input. It’s what Bluebeam likes to call “a single source of truth.”
Since the Wilshire Grand is truly the first project of its kind in LA, an always-accessible single source of information was invaluable for getting essential engineering concerns turned over to contractors. With the design firmly in place and construction progressing quickly, it continues to keep the groundbreaking project organized and on schedule.
“Every morning I drive into work and look at the LA skyline. It still seems kind of surreal to me that we are going to change it!” Watts says. For him and everyone else in this network of people changing the city forever, Bluebeam has been the tool that made it all possible. “Revu is a vital part of our workflow,” Watts says, “and really is a requirement for this job … I don’t know where this project would be without it.”
To learn more about the Wilshire Grand project, check out the case study from Bluebeam.