Tioga Building, Berkeley
164
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Tioga Building, Berkeley

Project Type

Structural Retrofit, Commercial

Date
Category
Commercial, Construction, Design, Structural
About This Project

The Tioga Building is in the heart of downtown Berkeley. It was constructed in 1952 using an ingenious lift-slab technology, wherein the floor slabs are poured on the ground and lifted into place along their supporting columns. Usually built around a central core for lateral stiffness, this building type is prone to severe lateral displacements in a seismic event and thus, often requires retrofitting.

 

In most cases the retrofit entails opaque shear walls or seismic X-brace systems along the outer edges. In this case, such a retrofit would destroy the beauty of the original design. Unsatisfied with a standard X-brace, we chose to use the clean modernist façade as a graphic canvas for a tree motif whose form embodies the building name, ‘Tioga’ an Iroquois word meaning ‘where it forks.’ The changing size and hierarchy of members suited the aggregation of forces as they are taken to the ground.

 

We developed strict standards to facilitate this output such that changes to the structural model were nearly instantaneous with changes in our final drawings. To facilitate a nimble workflow, structural output from our structural analysis program SAP2000 was taken through Excel, into Grasshopper, a parametric scripting program, through Rhino, a 3D form modeling program and into Revit our BIM software. This enabled us to develop both the overall geometry, the connections and the structural response in parallel and en masse.

 

Developed as Project Engineer with Integrated Structures, Inc.