After years of wrangling, Charlottesville’s bus transfer center is finally set to open on the east end of the Downtown Mall: Officials eye March 26 as the date that the Charlottesville Transit Center will actually begin service. The two-storey structure—the top floor for the Visitor’s Center, the bottom for buses—was originally slated for a November opening. But it ran into a snafu when the glass for the north wall that faces the Mall was found to be insufficiently thick for insulation purposes.
Part of the charm of the structure is that it’s designed for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) (www.usgbc.org/LEED) certification. But a big part of LEED certification is energy efficiency, and energy efficiency requires solid insulation.
 The wrong thickness of glass set the Charlottesville Transit Center off schedule a few months, but it’s back on track and slated to open March 26. |
“[The glass] was originally mis-specified by the architect and it simply needed to be redesigned,” says Mike Mollica, the City’s capital projects director. The flaw was not detected until early this fall, at which point architecture firm WRT (www.wrtdesign.com) was called in for a redesign. Once the city was satisfied with the reconfiguring, the City’s Board of Architectural Review (www.charlottesville.org) had to be consulted. Only after the redesign had finally made all the rounds could the new specifications be submitted to the glass manufacturer.
“Everything associated with that north wall is custom and it simply was an extensive process,” Mollica says. “There wasn’t anything we could do.” Builders only recently received the glass and its installation is well underway. “We actually completed everything we could within the building, given that we weren’t completely dried in at the time,” he explains.
With the target date only five weeks away, builders are also scrambling to complete the stairway that runs in front of the center and connects the Mall to Water Street. The final measure will be the repaving of sections of Water Street that were damaged during the construction. Originally budgeted at roughly $11 million both for construction and east end utility upgrades, the project has cost $9 million, to-date.
“It was frustrating for us to have to defer it but overall things have been coming together,” says Mollica, giving special praise to contractor Daniel & Co. “If you stand out there and look at it you’ll notice there’s hardly a right angle to the building,” he says. “So it has been somewhat of a challenge for us, but overall everybody’s very happy about it and we’ll be excited to see it open.”
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