Art Lives At GoggleWorks; Artists To Live At GoggleWorks II

A 1947 topographic map of the Reading, Pennsylvania area. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Entertainment Square at Second and Washington streets is about to get another boost, this one aimed at combination apartment/studios for professional artists.

Retailer Albert R. Boscov this week said his nonprofit Our City Reading is ready to start on a $4.5 million renovation of a still-unused portion of the GoggleWorks Center for the Arts on the square’s northeast corner.

That five-story building, also called GoggleWorks II, is connected to the main building by overhead walkways.

It will get 20 to 25 so-called live-work spaces, ranging in size from 1,200 to 2,800 square feet, with roughly a third of each to be living space in the interiors, and two-thirds to be studio space next to the big windows of what had been a safety equipment factory.

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GoggleWorks Apartment Project Uses An Unusual Steel Framing Process

Image via Wikipedia

The wraps on the new GoggleWorks apartments on Washington Street in Reading will be long gone by early summer. In the meantime, the $16.7 million building remains swathed in plastic to keep workers warm.

The plastic also has been covering up an unusual construction process based on a metal framing system. Instead of a typical structural steel framework filled in with masonry blocks and wooden planks, it has prefabricated metal framing and walls that stack in place made by ClarkDietrich Building Systems, an Ohio-based provider of steel construction products and services.

Eric Burkey, president of Reading-based Burkey Construction Co., the project’s general contractor, said the walls are set in place and the cold-formed steel joists and metal deck are set before the walls are placed on the floor above. The wall panels literally sit one on top of the other and carry through the overall height of the building.

“This kind of system has been around for a while,” Burkey said. “It just hasn’t been used a lot.”

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