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This month, shoppers in Dallas will have more than 20 new stores to visit, including Nordstrom NorthPark, the company's fourth store in the Metroplex.
ABOVE:An Omniplan Inc. rendering shows the NorthPark Garden and new AMC 15-screen theater.
BELOW:New construction surrounds the site of the outdoor garden entrance at the site of the future AMC-15 theater.
Images courtesy NorthPark Center. |
Dallas' 40-year-old shopping destination, NorthPark Center, will open the first phase of its two-year, $170 million expansion and renovation project this month with a new west-wing two-level mall expansion and two parking garages.
The project will nearly double the upscale mall's retail space.
Construction began in May 2004 and is scheduled for completion in April with a new three-level expansion connecting Nordstrom to the existing Foley's and a new AMC 15-screen theater and food gallery. Surrounded by the new construction will be an almost 2-acre outdoor lawn area in the center of the mall that used to be a parking lot.
The mall, which opened in 1965, was originally designed with an L-shaped center with mostly single-level space. The addition involves a 612,000-sq.-ft. two-level building and three-level expansion. The expansion is all two-level, said Phillip Jones, associate principal of Omniplan Inc., the firm that originally designed NorthPark.
Planning and Refining "The plan is to turn the L into a square including an approximately 1.5-acre garden that is flexible and big enough for original works of art," Jones said.
The expansion features both steel-framed composite concrete floor as well as cast-in-place post-tensioned concrete structure in the mall concourse areas. More than 30,000-sq.-ft. of the new two-level mall is built over the existing operating center and tenant space.
Foundations were placed inside existing tenants with drilled piers to 25-ft. depth -- accomplished without disrupting daily business, Jones said.
"This expansion has been in planning for 10 years," said Chris Szalay, director of marketing and tourism for NorthPark Center. "Because this is a privately owned center, we could take the time to plan this expansion in a way that makes sense and also works well for NorthPark and the retailers."
After the expansion, NorthPark Center is expected to be one of the top five shopping destinations in the country and is projected to surpass the $1 billion sales mark by 2007, Szalay said.
Meanwhile, Kit Fawthrop, senior project manager for Whiting-Turner Contracting Co. Inc., the project's general contractor, said building NorthPark is like building a custom home. "Our approach is that this is not a construction site, but first a shopping center," he added. "During construction we had to approach everything we did with the customer in mind."
The Obstacles In Store Construction staging and parking were issues because of the retail center's demand for parking and the mandate that there be no impact by construction to the daily operations of the center, Fawthrop said.
"We had to phase the construction around parking ," he said. "A minimum of available parking had to be maintained based on the monthly parking demand of the mall. To help manage this process, we developed a detailed site-phasing plan indicating parking required and parking provided on a monthly basis."
Fawthrop said existing parking structures were demolished north of the mall where Nordstrom and the expansion are located. This immediate loss of parking required Whiting-Turner to add new surface parking.
"That was followed by the construction of the new east parking garage," he added. "We opened more than 600 spaces to Foley's less than six months after ground breaking and during one of the wettest Junes in Dallas history."
The east parking garage has 1,664 spaces covering 642,000 sq. ft., and the west parking garage has 2,170 spaces covering 862,000 sq. ft. Both garages are cast-in-place, post-tensioned concrete structures and were recently completed.
Every major utility on the site had to be relocated to make room for the expansion while not interrupting the operations of the existing mall and anchor stores. Fire alarms and sprinkler systems had to be added throughout the mall.
"To meet city requirements, the fire alarm system turns out to be the second-largest single fire alarm zone in the nation, second only to the Pentagon," Fawthrop said. "All work is done on night shifts with full security on duty; tenant finishes are removed and replaced as required to install the new work."
Working with the existing retail tenants meant certain conditions had to be met. The existing mall structure joining Foley's to the mall was demolished to make way for the new two-level expansion. However, Foley's required public access from the mall.
Fawthrop said the solution was a temporary corridor connecting Foley's to the mall that featured a showcase window.
As part of the Foley's court reconstruction, one adjacent tenant was originally to relocate elsewhere in the center, but negotiations resulted in the tenant remaining, Fawthrop added.
He said: "This meant that the entire design for that area had to be scrapped and started over and we had to develop a construction phasing plan to allow the tenant to remain while completely demolishing the entire surrounding structure. This tenant became an island yet remained connected to the mall by our temporary access corridor.
"The new level-two structure was erected over the tenant space actually hanging from large roof trusses. The second-level columns are in tension contrary to the normal column loading in compression. All this work still had to be done by the original completion date required by Foley's."
ABOVE:The Field of the Cloth of Gold, 1987-1988 by Jim Dine, graces the court at Neiman Marcus.
Photos by Tom Hurst, courtesy of NorthPark Center.
BELOW:Infrastructure of the north wing shown in August.
Photo by Janice Peacock, courtesy NorthPark Center. |
Staying in Style Changes to the mall's design did not allow for deliveries to the inner-ring tenants, Fawthrop said.
"We had to construct two service tunnels that connect the outer service courts to the garden area," he said. "This also provides emergency exiting for the garden."
In addition to meeting the various requirements of its tenants, NorthPark also had specific demands for the design of the expansion. It was important that there be a continuation of the original architecture, Omniplan's Jones said.
And Szalay, the center's director of marketing and tourism, said: "Although some architectural changes in the new portion of the center will be evident, the overall construction style will remain true to the simple, classic elegance that is exclusive to NorthPark. Each new store will be framed by the same Texas brick that currently encases all original store entrances.
"The polished concrete floors in the expansion will be trimmed with dark-colored Tunisian stone instead of the tile in the existing portion of the center, which will be updated with the new stone once the expansion is complete."
The predominant exterior material is brick. A small percentage of that will be exterior insulation finish system. Interior architectural elements include an exposed concrete ceiling structure, stained, integral-colored concrete floors, skylights and clerestory and brick, Jones said.
Matching the original brick--a Texas clay product no longer available in the state--was difficult because the product is made in Perla, Ark. The expansion alone required more than 1 million bricks not including the parking garages, Fawthrop said.
All the tenant lease-line fascia and demising piers are constructed of brick. Having more than 20 brick masons inside the mall erecting walls as high as 60 ft., and also managing the interior trade work, wasn't easy, he added.
Matching the existing stained-concrete floor was a tedious process, Fawthrop said. The mall floor also has a Tunisian limestone border at the stained concrete floor.
The ceiling is constructed of exposed post-tension concrete beams. The beams are not only structural in nature but are exposed architecturally and were constructed "dead level" as required by the architect, Fawthrop said.
"This was required because a recessed ceiling is added between the beams. The ceiling is installed with a laser so any variation in the bottom of the concrete beam would become obvious," Fawthrop added.
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