Museums

by David Searls

The Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center is a 65,000 square-foot, $45 million facility in Skokie dedicated to survivors. Photo courtesy of Ron Gould Studios

In our newest regular feature, Concrete Decor magazine offers several stories exploring a common theme - how decorative concrete contractors answered the call on specific types of commercial or public jobs in ways that met or exceeded client expectations. This issue, we take a closer look at four decorative concrete projects for museums.

Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center, Skokie, Ill.
Contractor: Concrete Re-Surfacing Technologies Inc.

Concrete Re-Surfacing Technologies Inc. of Palos Park, Ill., was brought in to finish 8,000 square feet of plain concrete floor at the new Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center, one of the nation's largest memorials to the loss of millions of innocent lives during some of Europe's darkest hours.

Time was of the essence. In six weeks there'd be up to 15,000 guests, including former President Bill Clinton and internationally acclaimed Holocaust authority and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel. "It was the first week in March (2009) and the museum was to open April 17," recalls Concrete Re-Surfacing Technologies president Jim Loughrey.

CMU walls and polished concrete floors dominate the museum's point of entry for tours.
Photo courtesy of David Seide, Defined Space

The museum's design scheme kept one wing of the space aesthetically stark, sharp-cornered, and somber in appearance and feel. The other wing had softer lines and felt more uplifting and inspiring. The main difference in mood would come from the abundant natural sunlight that would be allowed to filter into the "lighter" space. The concrete floors would be natural and utilitarian throughout.

When Jim Loughrey and his crew took over, they were presented with a work in progress. The concrete contractor had intentionally burned the finish by slightly overtroweling in the final pass with the trowel machines. "The burn is created when the metal blades from the machine leave metallic residue on the surface, creating a marble look," Loughrey explains. "Higher areas on the surface pick up more residue. That surface was exactly what the architect had in mind for the look he wanted - but that surface would have been too porous and hard to maintain long-term. Our lithium-based polishing process enhanced the marbling and closed the floor for easy maintanance."

The team also tackled a couple of problems. There was lime run from the walls due to weather exposure before the roof had been installed.

Worse, an acid-based cleaning agent used to detail the concrete block walls had dripped onto the floor, removing the burned cream and graying the floor for up to about 18 inches out from the edges.

To fix the gray, Loughrey and his crew tried polishing first. "I figured we'd polish it to an 800 resin, but the color difference remained," he says. "We started with wet resin polishing pads, polishing from 100 to 800 grit. Then we densified with a Prosoco hardener/densifier."

Though faint, evidence of the damage remained. So, within weeks of the building's ribbon-cutting, the decision was made to spray on an acetone black dye to make the floor color uniform. "We applied more dye at the borders to catch those areas up with the center." It worked. And it fit the low-key theme to everyone's satisfaction.

"We think it looks nice," says Harold Di Vito, project manager for Chicago-based Tigerman McCurry Architects. "Much nicer than we expected. It keeps the essence of the concrete without compromising the aesthetics." He's also pleased that he got to choose from several color gradients applied in sample sizes for his approval.

"It's quite a dramatic place," says Loughrey. "The floors look like granite." As he recalls of the frantic times, "We burnished the whole floor (with Prosoco Consolideck LS Guard) on the 14th or 15th and the facility opened on the 17th." The museum opened with a floor that was striking in appearance, but not too pretty - perfectly appropriate.

www.barefootconcrete.net

Photo courtesy of Jeffco Concrete Contractors

U.S. Space & Rocket Center, Huntsville, Ala.
Contractor: Jeffco Concrete Contractors

The U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, Ala., commemorates humankind's reach for the moon and eventually onward to the planets and constellations beyond. The museum's polished concrete floor is similarly forward-looking in terms of crowd-pleasing durability. "It looks beautiful and you don't have to wax and strip it every year," says Jeff McCool, president of Jeffco Concrete Contractors.

The Tuscaloosa, Ala., company landed the contract to polish some 12,000 square feet of concrete poured as part of a major renovation to the Center, which serves as home to the internationally known Space Camp for bright and cosmically focused kids. "Polished concrete is our mainstay now," says McCool, who reports a total of 20 grinding and polishing machines in his hard-working fleet. "It's about as close to maintenance-free as you're ever going to get."

Maintenance savings and rugged durability are vital for the Center. As NASA's first visitor's center, it's hosted more than 12 million wide-eyed kids and parents since 1970. In 2007, when the Center undertook a major renovation that resulted in installation of a new main entrance and gift shop, polished concrete was specified.

Brad Jones, who served as project manager for the general contractor, B.H. Craig Construction Co., of Florence, Ala., sees the visual appeal of polished concrete as being just as important a consideration as the material's endurance and pragmatic functionality. "This is a tourist site, after all," he explains.

As for the results? "The floor looks like marble," he says.

The patient process of joint-filling, seven-step grinding from 80 grit to 150 grit, multiple resin applications and burnishing lent a touch of, well, space-age appeal to what would otherwise be rudimentary, low-tech concrete. It took McCool's crew three days, but the results are worth it. Or at least it gets a high grade from the Jeffco boss, who is proud to boast about the job. "I took my daughter, Katie, and her fifth-grade class on a field trip to the museum last year," he says. "And you bet I told them who was responsible for the floor they were standing on."

www.jeffcoconcrete.com

Photos courtesy of Royal Coat Inc.

North Carolina Maritime Museum, Beaufort, N.C.
Contractor: Royal Coat Inc.

It was end-cut hemlock, a 1-inch by 5-inch inlaid floor installed 25 years ago that looked just as gorgeous today as it did then.

But here's the thing... "We're quite susceptible to hurricanes here," says Barry Kreager, a decorative concrete contractor and president of Royal Coat Inc. "We've had seven of them in the last 10 years." And that was the problem with that exquisite hardwood floor in the 1,600-square-foot main lobby of the North Carolina Maritime Museum, in Beaufort. "It would jump right off the floor every time it got wet," says Bob Springle, the facility's business manager.

The last time, the cause of the damage was even more prosaic than one of the region's powerful hurricanes. It was a leaking toilet that sent the inlaid floor to the bottom of Davy Jones' locker. "We got a quote of $60,000 for the materials alone to replace it," says Springle. "I don't even know what the labor costs would have been."

For much less than the material costs, Kreager and Royal Coat, based in nearby Morehead City, promised a concrete floor that would fit right in aesthetically and take water damage with a smile and a dry mop. "It's a nautical museum, so there's a lot of wood there, wood-framed cannons and the like," he says. "So the floor had to have the right feel."

Kreager's crew spent much of their time stripping off the existing wood and the stubborn adhesive, then using a diamond grinder over the entire length of the floor. They also had to apply fill material to gradually ramp up doorways and entries. And do all of this around day-to-day foot traffic.

Meanwhile, says Kreager, "In our shop, we created a wood-grain concrete overlay system using a modified cement by Color Crown Corp."

Workers laid out the floor with tape to resemble planks and the seams between them and sprayed two tones of brown-tinted overlay coating for a dead-on wood-grain appearance. They used hard-bristle brooms for texturing, to knock off the glare and reduce the slip hazard.

"We've had quite a few positive comments from visitors, people who want to get in touch with the contractor and do something like this in their own homes," says Springle. Sure, it's beautiful and nautically thematic, but the facility's business manager says the most attractive aspects of the new floor were the price and its virtual indestructibility. "We get 200,000 people a year coming here and tracking sand in from the beach. All we do with the floor is mop it."

Don't worry about that inevitable next hurricane, adds Kreager. "Just hose the mud out."

www.royalcoat.com

Photo courtesy of L.M. Scofield Co.

Knight Museum and Sandhills Center, Alliance, Neb.
Contractor: Justrite Surfaces

You've heard of Stonehenge, right? How about Carhenge? It's an installation of half-buried cars, all laid out in a circular pattern that mimics the site's much older and more famous cousin. The pocket of western Nebraska that includes Carhenge and the nearby town of Alliance can seem about as windblown and mystically alien as the legendary British Isles site itself.

"It was pretty far from anywhere, that's what I remember most," says decorative concrete contractor Shane Siefken of Justrite Surfaces. Justrite, of Council Bluffs, Iowa, was given the contract to grind and polish the aggregate concrete floor of the newly constructed Knight Museum and Sandhills Center. Owned by the City of Alliance, the museum will showcase the region and its culture when it opens this summer.

The facility floor is textured with stones, some as large as an inch and a half in diameter, all brought to life with a grind and polish process using L.M. Scofield Co.'s Formula One Lithium Densifier and finish coat. "They wanted it to look like the earth," says Mark Chew, district sales representative for L.M. Scofield. "It will reflect the heritage of the Plains."

That's why those chunks of stone in the floor were trucked in from throughout Nebraska and the Plains region, a reminder as near as your feet of what the facility is all about. Chew, who worked with the client from the beginning to help bring their vision to life, calls the end product "the most beautiful floor I have ever seen polished."

It was conceived to be as naturally attractive and imperfect as the country it celebrates. Chew says that his clients told him that if the concrete cracked, that wasn't a bad thing.

As city official Shana Brown put it in an e-mail to Chew: "The design for the Knight Museum and Sandhills Center seeks to capture the spirit of 'place.' The essence of the Sandhills and the life that exists within it is a central theme to the structure. Keeping to that theme, the interior concrete floors are ground and polished to expose local aggregates, thus mimicking similar qualities to the surrounding earth. Over time, this concrete will crack and patina in just as the earth in the Sandhills does." Becci Thomas, curator for the Knight Museum, says the new floor is "very attractive, kind of eye-catching and will provide a good backdrop for our displays. It fits in very thematically with what we're doing here."

It will also be easy on the budget. "They've got a very low-maintenance floor with no sealing and no waxing," says Chew.

For the roughly 9,000 residents of Alliance, Neb., it will be a floor as rugged and seemingly eternal as the land beneath them. Or at least as permanent a part of the landscape as Carhenge.

(712) 366-1189 (Justrite Surfaces)

Vol. 10, No. 1
Jan 2010