Now Cruzio’s new building is more than a skeleton. We’ve got rooms becoming actual rooms, with sheetrock, tape and plaster. It’s exciting to see our floorplan fleshed out and becoming 3-dimensional at last.
We’re impatient to move in, but there’s still another month of work to go.
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When the walls in a steel-and-concrete building are framed, it’s silver all around. There aren’t any walls to block the light, so one room shines into another and another. Kind of sad that it has to get filled in.
by: Melody Parker
The Venue
The Festival Glen, the outdoor amphitheater alone makes this play worth seeing. The 8 PM show allows for a beautiful transformation from day to night characteristic of these summer months. I was surrounded by magical giants, redwoods that seemed to protect from harm as well as weather. The pine scent in the forest grove felt a million miles from the bustle of downtown Santa Cruz. Where else can you lay on a blanket, sip wine from the bottle, and watch a live performance under the stars? This decadent, romantic setting seems to push the limits of legality, but it remains perfectly legal.
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The noise, the big saws and bulldozers inside the building, the piles of broken-up walls and floors — that’s what’s going on at the Sentinel Building.
As demolition continues at the Sentinel Building, we can now see right through it.
The task of designing the Sentinel Building renovation went to Matthew Thompson, one of Santa Cruz’s most talented and influential architects.
His approach — preserving the brawny beauty of the mid-century modern building while upgrading its function — won the job for his firm.
Here is Matthew dashing through demolished concrete:
And here he is close up:
The demolition is happening fast at the New Sentinel building. That means lots of smashing and crashing. We’re opening up windows and doors to let light into the once-dour printing plant. Today Shane called us over to watch some walls fall down — doorways will replace them.
These are 50-year-old 6″ thick concrete walls full of rebar that have been cut straight through, carefully prepped, and today got pushed over with a tremendous bang!
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We start with a manufacturing building in downtown Santa Cruz. Our plan: to recycle and re-use the building for a couple of local organizations (Cruzio and Ecology Action). That means making the building people-friendly. Step one: it’s dark and gloomy inside. We need more windows and doors!
The original parking lot face of the building (notice, no downstairs windows at all):
Here’s what’s happening to that wall (that’s Shane standing in the foreground):
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We officially broke ground at the Sentinel building in March, but these days the work is really ramping up.
When you pass by Cruzio’s future digs you can hear the hum of equipment and see hard hatted workers milling about. Today the progress was more evident than ever when a new window was cut into the ground floor.
Tomorrow marks the one year anniversary of the fiber-optic cable cut that left much of Santa Cruz in the dark for more than 24 hours. (Otherwise known as The Great Internet Outage of 2009.) In our debriefing meetings at Cruzio in the days and weeks following the incident we discussed what happened, why it had the impact that it did, and how to make sure it didn’t happen again.
So what did happen?
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