Springsteen Center Featured in BD+C
Building Design + Construction magazine featured the Bruce Springsteen Center for American Music highlighting the unique, mass timber and steel hybrid structure and the distinctive weathering steel and glass façades.
Located on the Monmouth University campus, this new cultural landmark honors both the New Jersey-born rock legend and the heritage of American music. The ground level hosts public exhibitions, education programs, live performances, and events, with space for archives, research, and additional galleries on the second floor.
DeSimone’s in-house structural engineers, detailers, and façade and building envelope experts worked in concert to design and integrate the highly sustainable hybrid structure and façades of this new 30,000 SF cultural institution. Our approach integrated the timber and steel structure through a unified Tekla model, streamlining and expediting the fabrication, construction, and delivery of this net-zero-ready, all-electric building, which was designed to LEED Gold standards.
A key structural engineering challenge involved the design of the column-free span for the double-height theater, which is 70 feet long and 79 feet wide. We developed a shallow composite metal deck and steel structure to create the 70-foot column-free span in tandem with a steel-and-concrete masonry perimeter system that provided fire separation to accommodate a primary mass timber interior structure, which significantly reduced embodied carbon.
Façade challenges included supporting the large, one-story-tall weathering steel panels and the theatre’s glass curtain wall on the building’s north elevation, secured with 21 two-story vertical structural steel knife plates extending from the roof to the ground floor, which were exposed to serve as architectural design elements within the theatre interior.
Read the article on BD+C's website or download a PDF.
Architect: COOKFOX
Structural Engineers: Luis Ramirez, PE, Asim Khan, PE, and Alexandra Teniuch, PE
DeSimone Façade and Building Envelope Specialists: Benjamin Reich, AIA, Tony Zhang, RA
Detailer: Kevin Tsai
Photo: Alex Ferrec/COOKFOX
