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| Vol. 17, No. 20 | Feb. 19, 1998 |
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| Vol. 17, No. 20 | Feb. 19, 1998 |
"This is a monumental building. It rivals anything that's ever been built in the state," Hugh McBride said. "It will become known as a state treasure.
"This building could have been built in the 1860s: It has the thick walls of that time. It's a "100-year building," he said, one built to last for 100 years. "Nowadays," he said, "so much is built on the fast track. Things last 30-40 years at the most.
"The largeness of the features in the brickwork, the columns and the roofline-all of them make the building unique. The woodwork is just unbelievable. I've never seen anything as large. Each moulding has several pieces, and it wasn't unusual for us to start with a 4x12 and build off of it. It's all quite heavy.
"This building is here to stay...forever."
It's the coldest day in November, and Ray Paoletti is outside carefully placing bricks around a post in a wall next to Gore Hall. He's been in and out of the building for nine months.
"This building has more cast stone and limestone-and larger pieces of limestone-than we usually work with," the mason explained. "With the archways and all, we've worked with some really intricate shapes. Many of the shapes in the arches were custom-made. The arches have keystones-something you don't see much anymore because of the cost.
"The windows have jack arches. Instead of laying brick horizontally on the window head, one of the bricks is turned vertically so the brick can run around the window in an arch shape.
"I've heard an estimate that before we're done, we'll use 375,000 bricks. This is definitely fancier than your average building."
Framers Gary and John Veasey have put metal frames in buildings for more than 25 years, but they've never worked on a project like Gore Hall. "This is a first for us," John said of the large dome and many arches they have framed.
"This building is all domes and arches. We usually work in squares and rectangles," Gary explained.
To make the dome, the pieces of metal used in the framing were taken to a special shop, where equipment called a tract-bender bent them to the correct radius. The metal pieces were then brought back to the site. To put the fame of the dome in place, the Veasey brothers worked on scaffolding more than three stories high. They also did the framing for various dome arches throughout the building's three floors.
Gore Hall's dome, walls and outside cornices are much heavier than the usual drywall, Spacecon's Dilley explained. Six-inch studs support the walls in most places (four inches wider than an average building stud).
"The things that set Gore Hall apart are the high-end finishes used throughout," Dilley said. "It's been done carefully. The building really does blend in with the rest of the campus. In 10 years, when the bricks have faded a little and there is some wear on the sidewalks, no one will ever guess that the building isn't the same age as those on the rest of the Mall," he said.
A compass inside a sunburst is the best way to describe the striking and rich-looking terrazzo flooring inside Gore Hall's rotunda. The ground level features a 3-inch-thick, cushioned terrazzo floor that floats on a bed of sand. Plastic sheeting keeps the sand from bonding to the material itself, Paul Trevisan of Roman Mosaic said.
Upstairs, the floors are made of a more lightweight epoxy terrazzo, a 3/8-inch-thick terrazzo that bonds directly with concrete, Trevisan said.
"Each terrazzo floor is made as a special floor for a particular space," Trevisan said. "At each site, you set pattern strips and pour the terrazzo into the molds. Then, the terrazzo has to be ground. It's not like sheet vinyl or tile. It's very labor intensive."
Durable and requiring minimal maintenance, "terrazzo is the best material for heavy-use buildings," he said. "The floors have a nice appearance and are solid and long lasting."
"It's really unusual to work with millwork this big," Wilson said of the 7- to 9-inch crown moulding that graces Gore Hall. "Some of the casing around the doors is upwards of 8 inches high. You don't see that much anymore. Instead of pop-in window frames, each of the windows has at least five individual pieces of wood and blocking around it. You hardly ever see this much wood [mahogany] in a building any more.
"Then, there's the octagon-shaped atrium. Getting the corners of the moulding to meet out there can be tricky." The unusual shape posed some difficulty in aligning the trim, Wilson said.
"This was a good time for us. It was totally different from what we're used to doing. In my lifetime, I probably won't see another job like this," Ken Jester said.
The method of hand plastering used on Gore Hall is "becoming a lost trade," Jester said, as more and more new construction projects rely on dry wall. Putting three coats of plaster on the domed atrium ceiling with trowels was something many workers had never done before.
"Fortunately, we have some guys who have been around a long time. One of them is 70 years old," Jester said. "He and some of the others remembered hand plastering, and they were able to help the younger men."
Other areas of Gore Hall also reflect unusual plaster jobs, Jester said. The halls, for example, are cement drywall with two thin layers of plaster. There also are exterior plaster ceilings, something that is not common these days, Jester said.
"People who walk through Gore Hall won't realize the time and effort we put into plastering the dome, but we'll always know and it's something we'll always be proud of," he said.
Text by Beth Thomas and photos by Jack Buxbam
