Mary Baker Russell Music Center
Tacoma, Washington
Designer: Zimmer Gunsul Frasca Partnership
General Contractor: Absher Construction
The beautiful music hall at Pacific Lutheran University was fairly complicated to complete. Most of the panels were designed on a radius, so we had multiple radii to contend with. This challenge was overcome by creating positive and negative forms, which were used to bend the panels to the correct radii. This required extensive planning and patience, as the forms could only produce one set of panels each day.
The music center’s floor plenum created an unusual challenge for us. Due to the extensive ductwork underneath the hall seating, we could not use mechanical lifts to raise the finished woodwork to the high installation points. Instead, through the use of scaffolding and rope lifts, we were able to mount the lengths of bull nose trim 40 feet up on the ceiling perimeters.
