Rigging Grid Retrofit

[dafunkmonster]

Here at my school, there is a local venue that is in danger of being torn down. It was built as a movie theater and finished in 1941, and has since been modified to function as a bar, club, and most recently, a small concert venue.

The organization that has purchased it "looked at" (basically, talked to one structural engineer who didn't specialize in renovations) having the building renovated, and determined it would cost too much. They want to tear it down and build something silly.

There has been a large push (and largely popular petition; 1200 signatures in a town of 10000) to have it renovated to be a multi-use entertainment venue. Essentially, we want it to be capable of hosting everything from concerts to films to formal dances (not so much theater, but we're not ruling it out). Also, we would want to restore it to its original art deco design, or better yet, improve on it but stay true to the style.

Unfortunately, its a brick box with a spanned 70-year-old truss roof. In order to make use of the space, we want to retrofit it with a rigging grid. Not necessarily a fly system, just a grid for rigging chain motors.

Now, all of this is in the conceptual phase right now, but there's a group of us trying to put together a renovation proposal as well as some conceptual renderings for what the building would look like, if it were renovated/restored. But, we want to make sure that we get all our stuff right, and I wasn't sure where to start with regard to designing a free-standing rigging grid, so I figured I'd ask here.

What do we need to consider when looking at installing a grid, and what limitations are we going to have with installing it inside an existing structure without relying on the existing structure for support?


Note: We would be going through a consultant for this, but we're a group made up of mainly students and are trying to propose this idea (while making it as easy as possible to say "yes" by doing a lot of the legwork) to the powers that be, and therefore have zero money to invest in the process.

Any ideas or pointers would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Chris15]

Step one is to contact a structural engineer. Until they can tell you about the options for load, then you can't even begin to think about a grid. This will of course be LOTS more fun trying to work with Heritage considerations. Expect it to be expensive, messy and painstaking. Whatever you do will need to be "sympathetic" with the original building...

 

[Footer]

We had a venue in college that had no grid and was renovated and one was put in. Essentially they floated steel inside the buidling. Large I-beams where driven 30' into the foundation of the building and secured with concret. On top of these beams they put an I-Beam grid on 8' centers running US/DS. They capped each end. It gave us what we needed and did not require the building to be knocked down nor add additional support to the 100 year old walls. It was a pretty big deal getting that steel put in. I want to say that about an 1/8 of the cost overall renovation to the space was putting in that grid, and it was a 3 million dollar renovation.

 

[avkid]

If you don't mind saying, where are you located and what is the name of the theatre?

 

[gafftaper]

Similar to what Footer said, a university in the area here had an old wooden "grid" (which looked frighteningly like an Indian Jones set). They replaced it with a full steel grid. Rather than pulling the building down they built a steel tower inside the building. In this case, some of that work extended out into the FOH positions. Due to the odd apron configuration. They have an electric located over the pit. This electric was motorized in the remodel. They installed a winch system in the attic and put in some extra steel up in the ceiling to to strengthen the whole thing. All hidden above the ceiling.

This sounds like the sort of thing you would want to consider doing in your space. However you can dream up all the fun things you want. Without a structural Engineer on the team, your dreams are mostly worthless. Do you have a university in town with an engineering program? Perhaps you could find some grad students to help you get the ball rolling. You'll definitely need to get a theater consultant and a pro structural engineer on board as soon as you can afford them.

You might want to trade some PM's with MuseAV, you are getting into the sort of thing his company does for a living.

 

[Footer]

Just did some digging...

The OP goes to school at one of the best engineering schools in the midwest. It also happens have have a large greek community but lacks in the area of women. I have a feeling that he can dig up a few engineers to help get this proposal together if he can pry them out of their frat houses....

Its also the same school that I believe teaches a class in pyrotechnics. I had a few friends go through there for Mechanical and Electrical engineering that were highly involved in the theatre group on campus.

When you do talk to your structural engineering friends, I would suggest they look at the building within a building route. This might be a great capstone project for someone.

Oh... and St. Patty's day down there is EPIC.

 

[rwhealey]

It also happens have have a large greek community but lacks in the area of women.

I didn't even have to click on your link to figure out the school after this comment

Actually, I have a friend there who says that enough of the guys stay in their rooms and play World of Warcraft 24/7 that there really isn't a shortage of women.

(not intending to knock on the OP or Rolla too much...)

 

[Footer]

I didn't even have to click on your link to figure out the school after this comment

Actually, I have a friend there who says that enough of the guys stay in their rooms and play World of Warcraft 24/7 that there really isn't a shortage of women.

(not intending to knock on the OP or Rolla too much...)

I remember touring a dorm down there in 1997 when my brother was looking at schools and the students had Cat5 cable taped to the walls in all of the hallways. This was before they actually had cat 5 pulled through the walls. This is also the first place I heard the words MP3 and Napster.

 

[dafunkmonster]

Haha, yes, there's lots of WoW, not many girls, and a massive St. Pats celebration (from which I am still recovering). In fact, we get several days off school for it, and everyone basically parties for a week straight. I myself had to deal with setting up for, running, and DJ-ing for all of the week's festivities (which involved consistently going to bed at 6am). On the 7th day, I celebrated.

I myself am in the Computer Engineering program, but I'm also pursuing a technical theater minor, and am one of the handful of students who work doing production for everything from theater to concerts to parties and everything in between.

The mining department has an awesome pyro program, and in fact, our own Dr. Worsey was featured on The Detonators on discovery (I'm not sure its still on the air, though). They did a bunch of sweet pyro for our St. Pats coronation ceremony. The best part was being there for the demo for the fire marshal, because we had 8 of them show up, probably because Rolla has absolutely nothing going on. Then there's the infamous "Blow crap Up Day". (detcord is a staple)


The plan right now for us is to drum up support for maintaining the building's function as an entertainment venue. There has been a lot of talk about "adaptive reuse" of the building, turning the existing structure into an Alumni House, which most believe is not only silly, but incapable of sustaining itself money-wise (the only time alumni even visit is St. Pats or the career fair, and when visiting for the career fair, alums' expenses are company-paid). If we turned the building into a road house, then it could pay its own bills hosting events, and could be used by students as well (our TD is working hard to get the university on board with starting an Entertainment Engineering degree). Plus, then we could bring Patrick Swayze back from the dead to kick ass and break up bar fights (seriously, who wouldn't pay to see Zombie Patrick Swayze smashing furniture over people's heads?)...but I digress. The best part would be that there is already plenty of student labor available to run shows and work as local crew for tour stops, so the only position they would have to fill would be a TD.

I picked up photocopies of the original building plans from the university archives, and we're going to use them to build a digital model and render what the building would have looked like when it was built. Then we're going to use those plans as the basis for some renovation/addition designs, and pitch them to the Alumni Association. Our goal is to get these ideas fleshed out so we can present them professionally, not just "oh hey, what if we did this" in passing. Once everyone is on board, then we'll hand everything off to the professionals.

The free-standing steel building-in-building idea was what I was leaning toward, since I've seen it work before (and I don't trust the spanned 70 year old roof). I just wasn't sure where to start as far as sketching out a rough example, or if there were some quick guidelines for specs based on requirements. We're probably aiming for somewhere in the 50k-100k-lb range, which would allow us to support relatively high-production shows. It probably won't be full-height, but that won't really be a big issue, because it would be outfitted more for concerts rather than theatrical productions, and we won't need to fly out any full size drops. However, the roof is constructed such that it wouldn't be difficult to section out the upstage-most part of the roof, and build the building higher. However, this would also require a hard load-bearing proscenium wall which it doesn't currently have.

By the way, here is a photo of the building. The four angular pillars were originally a steel-frame glass lighting feature (they've since been covered with some crap-brown panels), and the marquis had a clock on the end and was intended to be much more heavily decorated. Right now, the facade looks like crap, but it could easily be rehabbed to look good in period art deco.

 

[shiben]

Remind me of why I went to my current school? I want a blow s*** up day! First up, a Colortran Innovator! But seriously, I think its cool that students can get on board with preserving an old building... Actually, I would imagine that you could probably get a bidding war started with grad students looking to design the thing for a project...

 

[SHARYNF]

You might be able to find a local structural engineer to help you out for some suggestions

Typically the issue you are going to run into is. If you can use the existing walls with some sort of added support and if the existing footer/foundation for the walls will support the load

If you go with the structure within the structure, then the issue once again comes down to the footer support for the structure. This will depend on the soil etc etc. I have seen situations where if the structure was to be totally independently supported with poor soil the footers for each vertical post were to be 16 feet deep. But again just for sake of discussion, by having the design tie to the existing wall and create for want of a better term a flying buttress like cathedrals in the middle ages, then the footer was reduced dramatically I believe to about 5 feet, based on the distribution of the load

In my experience, the gotcha's on this sort of renovation are the structural engineering issues NOT the architectural ones, and having the structrual enginner give you some guidelines based on what is existing can make a HUGE difference and help steer your design in the right direction.

In the case I was talking about it reduced the cost by about 5 million dollars

Sharyn

 

[Morpheus]

Remind me of why I went to my current school? I want a blow s*** up day! First up, a Colortran Innovator! But seriously, I think its cool that students can get on board with preserving an old building... Actually, I would imagine that you could probably get a bidding war started with grad students looking to design the thing for a project...

Yea... why did you go there? Mine is so much better, lol.

 

[dafunkmonster]

Well, its about time for an update.

Not more than three days after my last post, they started razing the building. Apparently, the backlash from alumni and students was not enough for the Alumni Association to halt the process.

Anyhow, we're at least going to go forward with some renderings of what the building would have looked like in '41, and maybe give a full-size copy to the Alumni Association to put up in their office and reminisce about when they realize how stupid an Alumni House is...lol

Unfortunately, just about every major change that happens here happens because "Mizzou did it". Mizzou ports email to Outlook live? Let's do it too! Mizzou (with its 25,000+ student body and hundreds of thousands of alumni) has an alumni house...so should we! (Even though we only have 4,000 undergrad and 2,000 grad students)

I found out recently that some of my colleagues at our Student Union Board had knowledge of the impending demolition 6-9 months before I found out about it. It would have been nice to know when they knew, we might have had a better chance at saving the building.

 

[photoatdv]

That's too bad. I'm somewhat involved with a project where the goal is somewhere between saving an old building and saving parts of and old building. The building manager has told us off the record they are full steam ahead for demoing it as soon as they get approval. The people in charge of it say it's not being torn down...