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Georgia Aquarium: Painting with the Fishes
The world's largest aquarium makes for a once-in-a-lifetime painting contract
by Mike Dawson
a half-million-square-foot structure plumbed and wired to keep 100,000 creatures happy in 8 million gallons of water, surrounded by artistically designed public areas that must hold up under the hands and feet of 3 million people a year.
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| A trowel-applied, textured, veneer finish using Duroplex was customized to give these walls a mottled effect. |
The roughly 10-acre project, the biggest thing to hit Atlanta since it hosted the Olympics, is a gift to the city by a leading citizen, who's paying for it out of his own very deep pocket. There has never been anything like it in the world, and the world will be watching.
One more thing — the other trades missed their deadlines, so it's up to the painting contractor to pick up the pace of the finishing so the doors can open on schedule.
Ask Jeffrey Diamond, president of Goodman Decorating Co. Inc. of Atlanta (www.goodmandecorating.com), who landed this whopper. His firm is accustomed to high-profile commercial jobs. But the new Georgia Aquarium, built for the people by Bernie Marcus, founder of The Home Depot, is a first.
"I will probably never see another job like it in my lifetime," Diamond said from his office in Atlanta. The design changes, technical challenges, and compressed deadlines were no sweet dream, he said. But neither was it a nightmare.
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| Latex paint from Sherwin-Williams was applied to the Atrium walls. The stairs were finished with DuPont Nason Finishes to imitate the look of stainless steel. |
"The reason it wasn't a job from hell is that I have such a good relationship with everyone I work with," Diamond said of his own personnel and the design team. Sure, there were conflicting ideas, he said, "but we all knew that everyone was focused on doing it right."
The Georgia Aquarium opened its doors in November of 2005. The entire project, from groundbreaking to grand opening, took only 27 months. The aquarium's exterior is designed to look like the prow of a ship cresting a wave. The interior walls are coated to give the feeling of moving water. The numbers, like the fish, get the public's attention. Viewing windows cover 12,000 square feet and contain 328 tons of acrylic. The main tank is more than 100 feet long, 35 feet wide and 33 feet deep, holding two whale sharks and tens of thousands of smaller animals.
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| A Duroplex textured veneer product was trowel-and-sponge applied
to provide a tropical feel. |
Behind the scenes lies a complex infrastructure of pipes, ducts, and conduits. "You will never see in all your life a more intense (mechanical-environmental-plumbing) environment," said Diamond of the jungle of apparatus covering the ceilings, sometimes 150 feet above the floor. Getting to the structural steel beams with Carboline Hi Performance 133 and 134 was like a mountaineering expedition. "It was a challenge for our people just to rig it safely."
At eye level, conditions were safer, but applications were no less challenging. In the viewing areas, the designers wanted all of the decorative coatings applied vertically. Diamond's painters used Duraplex Wash DS II in many of these areas, using hand trowels to lay the water-based acrylic around the profile contours of simulated stone structures and atop ornate designs.
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Top: The blue backdrop is latex paint applied to drywall. The doors
are routed MDF to simulate fish scales and painted with Zolatone "Kinesis." Four
or five passes of spray are required to give the intended chameleon
look.
Center: A small retail store shot illuminating
the use of colors and materials for a special effect. |
"It was incredibly labor intensive, but it turned out beautiful," Diamond said.
Duraplex is one of the many products supplied to the aquarium project by Triarch Industries Inc., a maker of architectural finishes and a distributor of imported Venetian plaster.
Bruce Wingate, vice president of the Rhode Island-based company, said that the formula of each application of Duraplex was worked out with the design team in advance, even before his company was assured of getting the job. Such is the nature of specification-driven work. Wingate depends on the Triarch sample department to impress prospective clients. It took more than 70 samples over a year's time before Triarch was ever assured of seeing a dollar from the project.
"It's all betting on the outcome," Wingate said. In large public projects, the risks are that a budget shortfall could lead designers to cut costs on finishes, or that a competitor could copy your designs late in the game and underbid with cheaper material.
None of that happened in this case, and the Georgia Aquarium was a big success for Triarch, which supplied large volumes of its Duraplex and Duraplex Dimensional Metals, as well as its imported Venetian plaster called Spatula Stuhhi.
One of the pleasurable aspects of such a job is the demand for innovation. When the designers wanted the stringers and risers of a monumental staircase to shine like stainless steel (without the cost), Goodman Decorating had the answer. They applied a metallic coating offered by Nason to achieve the desired look for the price of paint.
In all, Goodman used more than a dozen types of coatings on the Georgia Aquarium, and most applications were customized. The paints ranged from high-performance products from makers like Triarch and Carboline, to basics like Sherwin Williams' Series 200 flat, eggshell and semigloss latex. A close inspection would also find low-VOC products, direct-to-metal, various sealers on walls and floors, industrial enamel on doors and frames, and latex dryfall on places like exposed ductwork.
Beyond the paint, the company also installed a wide range of highly decorative coverings on walls, ceilings and pillars. When it was over, the company had more than 10,000 man-hours in the project, Diamond said, and none of it involved casually waving a brush. This project, after all, was the client's gift to the city, and he was spending $200 million on it.
"We felt it incumbent upon us to make it look as good as possible," Diamond says. "At the end of the day the people are there to see the fish, but they are going to be in a beautiful environment."
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