Santa Barbara Museum of Art

T&S Structural worked with Kupiec Architects to retrofit three wings of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art (SBMA), scheduled to complete wrapping construction in 2021. The Post Office wing, originally built in the late 1910s, and the McCormick wing from 1941, are of heavy unreinforced masonry (URM) construction and had gone through a variety of modifications over the years. The Preston Morton wing, built in 1960, is of more-modern reinforced block masonry construction. Floors and roofs throughout were of widely varying concrete and steel construction types. A new Art Receiving Facility with a high-capacity custom elevator was constructed with access to both the McCormick and Preston Morton wings, and the McCormick wing had a new gallery floor level installed within its existing footprint. Seismic retrofit of these existing buildings and interfacing with the new construction required a variety of strategies and extraordinary attention to detail. Some areas were replaced or supplemented with new steel and concrete construction, while other existing elements were reinforced using fiber-reinforced polymer (FRP) installation on concrete, steel reinforcement of existing roof members, or a number of other methods. The new seismic system largely consists of shotcrete shearwalls supported on new concrete grade beams with helical pile anchors for support.