LeMay – America’s Car Museum

Location: Tacoma

Owner/developer: LeMay – America’s Car Museum

Project team:JTM Construction, general contractor; Grant Price Architects, architect; Magnusson Klemencic Associates, structural engineer; SAK & Associates, concrete contractor; CalPortland, ready-mix supplier

LeMay – America’s Car Museum, set to open on June 2, is both a vintage car museum and a parking garage.

The building houses the museum’s administrative offices, banquet facilities, gallery spaces, retail and storage for the collection of vintage cars.

Its structure consists of concrete tilt-up walls with cast-in-place concrete ramps and elevated decks for the cars.

The heavy timber roof structure, supported by interior concrete columns, has 5-foot-deep glu-lam arches that span 100 feet and are wrapped by a curved standing seam aluminum roof.

Concrete work required various mixes totaling over 9,400 cubic yards, including a four-level, ramped cast-in-place display/storage facility with showroom space on the upper level. The entire structure is enclosed with exposed site-cast tilt-up concrete panels.

The concrete subcontractor worked closely with the general contractor and the owner’s design team in the value engineering stages, including the idea to convert the perimeter walls to tilt-up concrete. Using tilt-up concrete saved time and money, and gave the museum a distinct architectural look.

All the panels were erected in one day. Structural ramps and slabs were mostly done in the winter, calling for hot water and non-chloride accelerators as well as protection with insulating curing blankets.