Kern Center nears completion

Listen to this article

Hunzinger Construction’s Kern Center Project Manager Will Wright (third from right) leads some reporters through the Field House room. The balcony will have a 1/10 of a mile running track overlooking a gym floor with enough space for three volleyball cour

Hunzinger Construction Co. has a few loose ends to tie up in the Kern Center athletic complex before it hands it over to the Milwaukee School of Engineering on Oct. 1.

As of Thursday, one of the concrete stairways was still drying. The arena, the basketball and volleyball gymnasium, needed another set of bleachers. Workers still need to attach the five-foot plastic sheets to the top of the hockey rink walls and finish up the Zamboni machine garage. The wrestling room and running track both needed rubber flooring, and crews couldn’t put it around the ice rink until the dust starts to settle.

Hunzinger, based in Brookfield, started work on the more than $30 million, 210,000-square-foot sporting complex in fall 2003 and will finish on schedule at the end of the month. Hunzinger Superintendent and Kern Project Manager Will Wright said everything in the complex is on par with what you’d find in a professional sports stadium.

“Everything in here is top-end, state of the art,” he said. “The only thing that separates the gym is the seating capacity.”

About 512 different people worked at Kern over the entire project. There were about 177 people on site during peak construction, but now there’s roughly 112 working there, Wright said.

Many challenges

Wright said the most challenging aspect of building Kern was constructing the north-east elliptical corner. On the first floor, people in the weight-lifting and cardiovascular platform can look out the elliptical glass curtain wall, but the building retains the curvature all the way down to the ice rink on the bottom floor. Wright said it was tough having the glass, concrete and radiators on all the floors correspond to the curve.

“Now you are taking dissimilar materials and making them come together,” he said. “This is an engineering school, so they really tried to showcase the engineering of the building.”

Another obstacle was the steel beams for the room trusses were so large that the trucks hauling them to Milwaukee from Madison needed a police escort along Interstate 94. To build the ice rink ceiling, which is the floor of the arena, crews had to take apart a crane and reassemble it in the foundation. They left an opening in the rink ceiling to take the crane back out again after the trusses were in place.

Workers installed a five-layer underground system to create the ice for the hockey rink, which includes a layer with three miles of heated piping below a layer with 10 miles of refrigeration piping that freezes the concrete surface that the ice rests on. The heated pipes will keep the ground underneath the rink from shifting because of the refrigeration pipes.

After saying that his crew would be out by Sept. 30, Wright added, “September 24 —we’re making ice.”

MSOE will begin moving into the building in early October and will throw its grand opening party on Oct. 29 and open Kern’s doors for public tours on Oct. 30. The school plans to open Kern to students and faculty first to see how much use it gets, and then it will plan out how and when to make it available to the non-MSOE public.

Sean Ryan can be reached at 414-276-0273, Ext. 107, or by email.