Went on a brief tour of the mechanical systems last Thursday with a group from the MCA
What an impressive building, the scale was deceiving (for me anyway), absolutely massive display and exhibit areas.
They were testing the heating system while we were there, so the building felt like it was about 80F, nice to know it's working!
Some mechanical highlights for those who may be interested:
The enormous main gathering area has heated and chilled flooring, depending on the demand. I don't recall offhand but there are many thousands of feet of underfloor hydronic lines to make this possible.
As I believe Cold showed in a previous photo post, there is trench heating around the perimeter of the gathering area which we don't see very often here, but does it ever look sharp with the architectural floor grilles
There is a theater space on the second level which employs chilled sails as a means of tempering the space, another very cool, but uncommon method of cooling. Ventilation diffusers are floor mounted under the theater seating
The entire fire suppression system is piped with galvanized steel. The reason for this is, in case there is a leak in the exhibit areas, the damage is limited to clean water only and not rusty water.
Another feature which I thought was very cool, was the use of special mechanical rooms around the building to house all the terminal boxes and humidification systems. There are only air diffusers and fire suppression in the display areas, any heating/cooling systems are confined to dedicated mechanical rooms in the basement or these interstitial spaces.
Almost every air handling unit in the building has 100% redundancy, one of the units is so massive that it had to be custom built around a support pillar in order to accommodate the sheer size.
Lots of stuff that I'm leaving out, it was very informative for an HVAC junkie like myself, but this isn't everyone's cup of tea.
I will say, if the opportunity arises for any of you to tour this facility, I highly recommend it. It's amazing what goes into making a building of this scale function, commendable job done by all involved
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