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T.B. Penick & Sons received First Place in Concrete Artistry, Over 5000SF for Unity Plaza in the 2018 American Society of Concrete Contractors - Decorative Concrete Contractors.
Unity Plaza serves as a hub connecting businesses, residents, City College, and Muni routes in the area with the goal to be known as an iconic, attractive, comfortable and safe gathering place in addition to an enduring and lasting presence in the community. The plaza features benches, pedestrian lighting, a domed climbing-structure and photography displays depicting the area’s history.
T.B. Penick closely collaborated with the City of SF Landscape Architect Jasmine Kaw and artist Kelly Ording to install her paving-design entitled “Ebb and Flow” which is a homage to the Plaza’s micro-climate and its constant cycle of fog, sun and wind. According to Kaw, the design is “a unique pattern and required a specialized paving contractor to execute. The design team turned to Penick early in the design process. The Lithocrete paving material not only brought unique colors and textures but successfully enabled the artist’s two dimensional vision to become a reality at a large scale.”
TBP poured the 8” thick plaza using white cement. In the “Chevron” design, Penick top-seeded blue aggregates before applying a broom finish to the surface. Penick then performed decorative saw-cuts and sandblasted to expose the seeded-aggregate. In the “Sun” design, black aggregate was seeded before applying a broom finish and then saw-cut before being sandblasted. The “Wave” design features decorative saw-cuts in a wave pattern superimposed over quarried stone finish that was stained with an opaque black water-based stain.
The entire project consisted of 1,300 lineal feet of decorative saw-cuts and an additional 2,900 lineal feet of saw-cuts. The project required approximately a week and a half of sandblasting.
Challenges of the project include the difficulty of working with white cement, and accurately laying out the numerous sandblast stencils, which required 3-days, and the tremendous effort of containment and cleanup of sandblast debris.
For over a century, we’ve seen changes in every aspect of construction. It takes an agile company like ours to meet today’s aggressive schedules and tighter budgets, offer cutting-edge methodologies such as BIM, advocate best practices and offer safe and sustainable construction practices. Clients across the country turn to us for general construction, design-build, construction management, structural concrete and Innovative Concrete Systems.
