Lightcatcher Building is LEED Certified

Brett Williams is a visual journalism student at Western Washington University. He has been published in The Western Front, The Lake Stevens Journal and the AS Review, and has done extensive editing on The Planet Magazine and The Western Front. He loves travel and outdoor adventure.

New and old come together as the state-of-the-art Lightcatcher Building joins the Syre Learning Center and the 1892 Old City Hall building as the latest addition to the Whatcom Museum in downtown Bellingham.

With only finishing touches and minor repairs left to complete, construction crews are wrapping up the yearlong project, and museum officials have announced that the building will finally open its doors to the public on Nov. 14.

Working closely with the city of Bellingham and the Whatcom Museum Foundation, architect Jim Olson and his team wanted to do much more than simply add another building to the museum’s facilities — they wanted to create a space that would become synonymous with the public’s image of Bellingham.

“There are two icons in Bellingham: the Old City Hall and the Mount Baker Theatre,” Olson said. “We wanted this building to be a third one. But rather than do another tower or spire, our thought was to create a space where people could gather. There’s one thing in the Northwest that we all wish we had more of: sunlight. So we decided to build this gathering space around something that would reflect light or bring more light in.”

And that’s exactly what Olson and his team at Olson Sundberg Kundig Allen Architects did.

Located at the corner of Grand Avenue and Flora Street, the building gets its name from its central feature, a 180-foot-long curving, translucent wall that dominates the building’s façade. At 34 feet tall, the Lightcatcher wall not only illuminates the building’s interior in natural light during the day, but also offers passersby a view of the daily activity taking place inside the structure. During the evening hours, glowing light pours out of the Lightcatcher’s glass windows, creating an experience evocative of light passing through an agate.

“We even colored the wall slightly so that when you’re on the inside, you experience a kind of amber-like glow like the color of those rocks,” Olson said.

Using and celebrating light was very important in the design of the Lightcatcher Building, Olson said, but they also wanted create a structure that felt like it could only exist in the Northwest.

Wood is used on the interior ceilings, cut and stained to remind visitors of weathered driftwood common to many shorelines. The concrete floors are intended to look and feel like the wet sand and pebble of Washington’s coastal beaches. Silver metal highlights are reminiscent of the typical gray sky of the Pacific Northwest.

The Lightcatcher Building has 10,000 feet of climate-controlled gallery space spread over two floors, allowing officials more flexibility in bringing special exhibitions to the museum for public viewing. Because the Old City Hall building was never equipped with the appropriate climate control technology, major fine art shows could not be safely shown in the old museum space.

The same attention to the interior look and feel of the new museum is also evident in the exterior spaces of the building. The Lightcatcher wall was designed not only as a translucent wall, but to be used as a big, blank canvas for artists to project images onto.

“Architecture is an art, but it’s also functional. When you incorporate art into that, it makes the architecture much, much richer,” Olson said. “The whole building becomes a kind of backdrop for art and artists to play with.”

The 42,000-square-foot building is Washington’s first museum certified to LEED Silver-Level standards. The Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) rating system, regulated by the U.S. Green Building Council, provides a universally-recognized set of standards for environmentally-sustainable construction.

Olson’s design incorporated a number of environmentally-friendly features, including natural ventilation, a rainwater harvesting system and a 3,000-square-foot garden roof above the building’s lobby.

Fans of the old Whatcom Children’s Museum will be happy to hear that the Lighcatcher Building includes a 3,000-square-foot interactive gallery geared toward children and families. However, visitors may encounter some unexpected changes on their first trip—namely the addition of an entry fee for all exhibit goers.

“We need to become less reliant on taxpayer dollars. The museum is a nonprofit organization operated jointly by the city of Bellingham and the Whatcom Museum Foundation,” said Laura Johanson, spokeswoman for the Whatcom Museum. “The goal is to support nearly half of the museum’s operations through the Whatcom Museum Foundation by 2012 as the city of Bellingham continues to cut funding.”

On Thursday, Oct. 1, the Whatcom Museum announced a new yearly membership plan that would allow members unlimited access to the museum and all of its facilities, including the Lighcatcher Building, the Old City Hall building and the Syre Learning Center. There are different levels and packages of membership that range from $30 to $500. Prices are $30 for students, seniors and military personnel and $75 for families.

“It would be wonderful to continue to have the museum be free for everyone. It’s hard to start paying for something that’s been free for so long,” Johanson said. “Most people realize however, that while the museum may be free, it is not costless. A few museums have endowments or subsidies that allow them to offer free admission and programs, but most — and the Whatcom Museum is now in that category — have to pay their own way, one way or another.”

With the $12.8 million facility nearing completion, many community members have wondered where the money came from to build such an expensive, state-of-the-art museum during such tough financial times. According to Johanson, the Lightcatcher’s design and construction were funded through a combination of public and private funds, with the majority coming through the Bellingham-Whatcom Public Facilities District (PFD), an entity created in 2002 by the Bellingham City Council and the Whatcom County Council.

The PFD was then authorized by Washington state legislature for the purposes of creating financially and culturally beneficial regional centers, according to Johanson.

The PFD receives one-third of 1 percent of sales taxes collected by the state in Whatcom County. According to Johanson, the grand opening of the Lightcatcher completes the final and largest project under the PFD’s authority to create a cultural district in Bellingham. The remaining funds for the Lightcatcher have been raised privately by the Campaign for the Arts through the Whatcom Community Foundation. §