Roof-Top Surveying Sets Stage for Down-Under Aquarium Expansion

When construction is completed in Spring 2005 on a 65,400-square-foot expansion of the National Aquarium in Baltimore, visitors will marvel at a multistory, Northern Australian river valley experience and enjoy a virtual journey through Maryland’s coastal, Piedmont, and Allegheny regions. But, before crews install the towering rock formations, fine-tune the terrestrial and aquatic habitats, and release the exhibit’s free-ranging birds, workers must integrate critical components of the aquarium’s complex infrastructure. In August, KCI surveyors helped the project’s contractor verify the geometric fit of the exhibit’s concrete tank walls and acrylic viewing panels.

“The manufactured geometry of the tank’s viewing panels will vary by vendor,” explained David R. Pavlick, PE, project manager for Aqua Venture, a joint venture of Whiting-Turner and the Barton Malow Company. “At the point when the architect developed the curvilinear geometry of the tanks and viewing panels, we hadn’t selected a manufacturer. So, without having the finite element analysis that would determine the panels’ exact dimensions, the burden shifted to the contractor to finalize the geometry in the field. Once we had the acrylic panel shop drawings, we asked KCI to lay out the intersection coordinates for the walls.”

Working on the rooftop deck of a nearby parking garage, KCI surveyors Dick Dodson and Joe Davis mapped out the challenging, curvilinear designs. “Dick provided the bridge between the contract drawings and the shop drawings, backfilling the missing data,” said Pavlick. “KCI delivered a total station solution to the wall layout, getting us to a point where we could solve the remaining variables in CADD and keep the project on schedule.”

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