SAN FRANCISCO'S NEW ASIAN ART MUSEUM

摘要

The City of San Francisco's Old Main Library, a 1917 historic building constructed of structural steel andunreinforced brick masonry, was recently renovated and transformed into the New Asian Art Museum.The Museum houses an irreplaceable collection of Asian art and artifacts, including immensely valuable,brittle Ming Dynasty vases, and represents the largest non-property asset in the City of San Francisco withan estimated value of $5 Billion. The adaptive reuse of the 180,000 sq. ft. building was orchestrated bythe Milanese architect, Gue Aulenti, FAIA, known for her adaptive reuse of the Gare D'Orsay, a Parisiantrain station, into the internationally reknowned Musee D'Orsay.The seismic design criteria for the project was certainly to protect the brittle and vulnerable historic fabricand structure of the building. However, the primary objective was to protect the art collection on displayand in storage. For both 'moderate' and 'severe' earthquakes, the goal was to suffer no loss in collectionvalue.The Museum structure and collection were seismically protected by a combination of base isolation andsuperstructure reinforcement. The isolation bearings were placed over a reinforced mat foundation systembelow the original slab on grade. A new suspended floor, above the isolation plane, supports basementloads. Reinforced concrete shear walls, from the top of the basement floor to the roof level, provided acomplete and rigid lateral load path for all sections of the building. Floor diaphragm reinforcement andcollector lines tied the existing and new floors into the shear walls.Base isolation combined with superstructure reinforcement provided the most reliable protection availableto the artifacts stored and displayed in the Museum. Base isolation allowed architectural freedom tomanipulate the floor plate in a manner that optimized gallery space and light distribution. The seismicdemands imposed on displayed artifacts were reduced to a level for which conventional artifact bracingmethods could be effective.