Constructing the four trapezoidal sides of Wilshire Boulevard Temple’s sculptural gem, a 75-ft-tall “machine for gathering” with three sloping faces, was the most daunting aspect of the project. “The concern was the facade,” says Stephen Montoya, vice president of operations for MATT Construction.
The team explored and rejected panelizing the exotic enclosure—a jigsaw puzzle of sorts containing 1,230 same-size hexagonal panels with rectangular openings for windows or grills. Instead, crews from Performance Contracting Inc., under a design-build contract, stick-built the multilayer rain screen facade. Among other factors, field-building “allowed us to control tolerances from floor to floor as the structure adjusted,” says Montoya.