Education

Seattle University’s new bookstore is prominently located at the northeast corner of campus at 12th and Madison. The store occupies ground floor of a five-story, 82,000 square foot, reinforced concrete storage building that was originally built for the Bekins Storage company in 1910. The structural retrofit of the storage building involved removing a concrete mezzanine to create a high retail space, framing a new opening in the ground floor to provide a new entry and then seismically retrofitting the building to current code standards. The seismic retrofit of the building was done using shotcrete shear walls at select opaque perimeter walls, removing or bracing unreinforced masonry partition walls and installing buckling restrained braces (BRB’s) at open window bays. The BRB’s were used in part to keep the brace and end connection sizes to a minimum to reduce their impact to the windows. The construction took less than a year to complete, all while the building was still occupied by the storage tenant.