The Auburn Justice Center

The new Auburn Justice Center in Auburn, WA was developed with several goals in mind. It needed to meet the current and future operational requirements of the City's police, court, prosecutorial and probation departments and it also needed to preserve the architectural design of the original Art Moderne building built nearly 60 years ago. Furthermore it needed to be done within a budget of ten million dollars.

The original building was a one-story structure with 80 foot long bow trusses that had been originally constructed in 1901 as part of another building. They had been shipped to the Auburn site and erected by crane in 1947 to be part of a new large and innovative grocery store. The building also had a distinctive marquee and a rounded front entrance that were very much a part of the building's character.

The first major design hurdle was one of size. The footprint of the existing building was not large enough to accommodate all the required functions. The solution found was to excavate the interior floor down 7' allowing the existing roof and wall structures to remain at their current elevations. The design team and contractor developed a means to excavate near the perimeter by shoring the existing exterior footings. The overall building area with the new ground floor is approximately 33,000 square feet.

But, there were still many structural hurdles to overcome. All the exterior footings were insufficient in size and strength and the building had settled several inches due to soil subsidence and several significant earthquakes. The solution was the installation of pipe piles along with new concrete caps around the building perimeter to stabilize the existing footings and also provide a means to level the building.

Several of the existing roof trusses were found to have breaks in the laminated wood bottom chords. Our repair was to jack the trusses to the appropriate elevations, epoxy injecting the break areas, and adding new steel angle bottom chord tension members to supplement the existing bottom chords. The 8' high existing unreinforced masonry parapets were a significant seismic hazard. It was decided it was more efficient to replace with new light gauge parapet walls braced to the roof structure with diagonals. The wood roof decking did not have adequate shear strength so a layer of plywood was added to act as an additional diaphragm to distribute seismic forces. The existing unreinforced masonry walls were insufficient to act as lateral force resisting elements and were also seismic hazards that need stabilizing. Our solution was a series of internal steel braced frames added around the perimeter to act as the primary lateral force resisting system for the entire building and to reinforce the masonry walls.

Project Team:
Owner/Developer: Jeff Oliphant, Auburn On Main LLC
Architect: J. Dobritz, AIA
Contractor: Sierra Construction