Final touches are complete on the new, $15 million Reigner Family Wonderscope Children's Museum, which is set to open today at 433 East Red Bridge Road in Kansas City, Mo.
Kansas City’s newest 30,000-SF children’s museum features ten dynamic exhibit spaces focusing on STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts and math) activities, birthday party rooms, classroom spaces and a half-acre of outdoor educational fun.
Western Specialty Contractors’ Great Plains Roofing and Sheet Metal Branch of Kansas City, Kan. installed the “cherry on top” of the eye-catching building, which included the colorful, metal wall panels above the museum’s exterior entrance, along with Thermoplastic Polyolefin (TPO) roofing.
A crew of six workers installed the .125 aluminum plate wall system, manufactured by Northclad, which consisted of 210 brightly colored, angled panels that averaged 7 feet tall with widths ranging from 2 inches to 6 feet. Western used a series of subgirts to attach the metal panels to the building’s façade and also installed 800 SF of Firestone fully-adhered TPO roofing over the top of the panel area. The installation was completed in twenty days.
Western branch manager Rod O’Bannon said installing the panels in the complex pattern, which were designed by the Dimensional Innovations, posed the greatest challenge on the project.
“The museum will be recognizable by its unique façade, so we had to make sure we had it right. Each panel had custom angles, so aligning them correctly with equal spacing was a challenge, but our experienced crew did an outstanding job,” said O’Bannon.
General contractor, McCownGordon Construction began construction on the musuem in March 2018. Other project partners included Haizlip Studio, MIG Portico, Paul Orselli Workshop and CBRE.
For the past 30 years, the museum has resided in the former Flint Elementary School building in Shawnee, Kan.
Read previous, related MWM story here from June 2020: Construction progressing at Wonderscope Children's Museum