WVUP Tower Gets Face-Lift

By John Hickey

West Virginia University at Parkersburg is getting a new face. A new colorful “glass curtain wall” will this year become the architectural facade of WVUP’s three-story classroom tower. A $2.9 million stabilization and renovation project is underway, which will install the new facade while fixing the foundation problems that for years have been literally pulling the building apart.

Wayne Riley, director of purchasing and the project coordinator, says that about six years ago WVUP faculty and staff started to notice cracks in the concrete blocks that form the walls of the classroom tower, which had been built in 1975. The cracks appeared in several locations in the tower and over time became, in some places, several inches wide and almost six feet long.

PSI, an engineering consulting firm, was called in, Riley said, to take core samples of the building’s foundation soil, which was found to be substandard and deemed the cause of the problem. Burgess and Niple, an architectural and engineering firm, designed a solution to stabilize the building and provide the new facade, and Jendoco Construction has been awarded the $2.5 million contract to carry out the design. Jendoco began work in December and are, Riley says, ahead of schedule.

The brick facade of the three-story stair tower, on which the school name is now displayed, will be torn off the building. (The stair tower has slowly been tearing itself off the building for years, as Riley showed the Chronicle.) The long glass curtain wall will be mounted in its place, with the school name displayed above it, once the rest of building is stabilized.

The classroom tower will be bolted into a massive support system which will take the building’s weight off the existing substandard foundation soil, transferring the weight out to three new steel-and-concrete structures each anchored thirty-five feet deep into the earth.

Riley said the choice of this unusual solution was partly motivated by the fact that building the support structures outside the building would cause relatively little disruption to the school, in comparison to a contemplated alternative plan to build supports down through the interior of the building.

Some disruption has of course occurred. The East Entrance has been blocked off. Alternate space has had to be found for some classes and the faculty lounge has been closed. The road from the lower parking lot to the upper parking lot is blocked to vehicles, and no one can currently be dropped off at the main entrance. The bus from Parkersburg, which had dropped off passengers at the main entrance, now stops instead at the Activity Center.

WVUP’s contract with Jendoco specifies that “time is of the essence,” meaning that Jendoco has a contractual obligation not only to do the work according to specifications, but to complete the work by an agreed-on time, in this case Dec. 14, 2006. If the work were to get behind schedule, as many construction jobs do, Jendoco would owe WVUP a thousand dollars per day for every day past Dec. 14 that the job was unfinished. Riley says Jendoco expects to complete the work well ahead of schedule.