Renovation, Restoration, Adaptive Reuse  

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From its beginnings in the 1920s to the breakup of the Ma Bell monopoly six decades later, Bell Labs—the new-technology division of AT&T—was arguably the most successful corporate research organization in the world. Among its scientists’ achievements were the development of the transistor, the continuously operated laser beam, and cellular networks. The institution’s researchers were so prolific, and their work so consequential, that they garnered six Nobel prizes, including one for a discovery that confirmed the big bang theory.

The site of many of these breakthroughs was an immense mirrored-glass box in suburban Holmdel, New Jersey. The original portion of the structure, designed by Eero Saarinen and Associates and completed in phases in 1962 and 1964, sat on 472 pastoral acres and was surrounded by a rolling landscape created by Sasaki, Walker and Associates, with lagoons, lawns, groves of trees, and 5,000 parking spaces. Expanded in the 1980s by the Saarinen successor firm, Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo Associates, the 2 million-square-foot complex at its peak hummed with the activity of nearly 6,000 employees.

But the scientific ferment wound down well before the AT&T spinoff, Lucent Technologies, put the building on the market in 2005. Zoned for a single tenant and too large to appeal to most corporations seeking a suburban location, it was threatened with demolition. Then Somerset Development bought the building in 2013 for $27 million after convincing the town to allow multiple tenants. Now renamed Bell Works, and renovated according to a master plan by New York–based Alexander Gorlin Architects, it has been transformed into a mixed-use facility that Somerset president Ralph Zucker calls a “metroburb”—a term he coined. It is a city in microcosm, he says, containing all the elements of a thriving downtown, from workplaces and retail space to art and culture, but in suburbia.

The transformation was made economically viable by selling some of the original site’s outlying property for a subdivision of neocolonial houses arrayed around cul-de-sacs. But despite the unfortunate architectural disconnect, Zucker’s metroburb idea seems to have legs. Bell Works is now 90 percent leased, with office tenants such as software developers, law firms, and investment companies as well as shops, several eateries, a yoga studio, a hair salon, and a branch of the county library. The project benefited from historic-preservation tax credits, because the building and primary portion of the site and its landscape earned national landmark status, in 2017.

Saarinen, who died in 1961 before the building was finished, conceived the research facility as four discrete but conjoined laboratory blocks within its then-novel reflective enclosure. He arranged the concrete-framed structures so that they define an immense five-story-tall cross-shaped skylit atrium spanned by bridges and wrapped with cantilevered walkways. He also placed circulation routes at the building’s perimeter, where they separate the laboratory boxes and the mirrored skin, through which users could look at the landscape. The expansion by Roche and Dinkeloo (who had worked for Saarinen) extended the ensemble by relying on the same DNA, adding four more blocks, this time framed in steel—two at each end of the atrium’s main axis.

The resulting central space is impressive for its architectural expression and its scale, achieving what Gorlin terms a “rectilinear grandeur.” Including the 1980s additions, the atrium’s main axis, punctuated with a pair of stalwart concrete vertical circulation cores, is more than 1,000 feet long. Gorlin points out that the atrium’s 100-foot width comes with a strong legacy of awe-inspiring spaces. It can be found in the nave of St. Peter’s Basilica, the central barrel-vaulted portion of Paxton’s Crystal Palace, and the courtyard of a roughly contemporaneous project—Louis Kahn’s Salk Institute for Biological Studies (1963).

At least while engaged in their work, the Bell scientists were shut off from this spectacular space, which then included elaborate plantings. The individual lab blocks were clad almost entirely in metal panels, making them mostly opaque, and the environment within highly controlled with air-conditioning and electric illumination. Quoted posthumously in the October 1962 issue of RECORD, Saarinen painted a picture of someone emerging from deep concentration in a laboratory and encountering “a sweeping view of the countryside or the formal planting of the winter garden interior court,” predicting that the researcher would “feel refreshed by his encounter with nature.”

Since such insular workspaces would probably not appeal to today’s office tenants, Gorlin recommended swapping the majority of the metal panels enclosing the labs for glass. He won approval from the National Park Service, which administers the landmarks program, by arguing that the blocks’ structural grid was their defining element, not the cladding material. And—to give the boxes’ atrium-facing elevations a uniform appearance—the project team created design guidelines for tenants; these include a 3-foot drywall soffit and a lighting cove just behind the atrium-facing glass and specifications for cubicle placement and signage.

Gorlin’s contribution includes two piazza-like areas near the atrium crossing, delineated in various gray tones of porcelain floor tile and based on Josef Albers’s works on etched glass from the 1920s. Vaguely resembling overlapping and layered columns and beams and the shadows they might make, the compositions serve to anchor the vast space, which hosts events such as holiday parties and a farmers and craft market. Varying shades of yellow carpeting in a sunken reception area replicates what had originally been there and bears a striking resemblance to the artist’s Homage to the Square series.

Some of the most critical modifications are practically invisible. The original HVAC infrastructure for the labs included a dual-duct variable air volume (VAV) system enclosed in vertical shafts that divided the floors into several long and skinny bays. This has been replaced with a variable refrigerant flow (VRF) system coupled with a dedicated outdoor air system (DOAS) and energy recovery. Not only is the new infrastructure more efficient, but it provides occupants with more control, and it allowed the opening up of the previously compartmentalized floor plates, maximizing rentable square feet. It also meant the client could build the system in phases, as spaces were leased, explains Eric Collins, a division manager at Becht Engineering, the firm that developed the conceptual mechanical design for the renovation.

The atrium infrastructure was also updated to comply with current smoke-evacuation requirements. It now has a DOAS for ventilation and fan coils for space conditioning, while 28 exhaust fans in the upper reaches of the atrium can vent the smoke from the voluminous space. Such a setup would normally include facade louvers for drawing in fresh air. But at Bell Works, because the mirrored skin was considered essential to the landmark status, engineers modified the building’s 42 entry doors so that they open in the event of a fire to supply so-called “makeup” air.

Unlike the facade glazing, the glass of the skylight was not considered critical to the building’s landmark status. Relying on the original weathering-steel structure and framing, its 3,200 panes have been replaced with clear silicon-film photovoltaics (PVs) sandwiched between safety glass. The PVs are invisible but generate 60 megawatt hours of electricity annually, which offsets about 25 percent of the energy consumed by the lighting in the building’s common areas.

Zucker plans a 170-room hotel on the roof, surrounding the skylight, using prefabricated pods. The scheme already has town planning-board and National Park Service approval. It would complement the conference facilities on the building’s concourse level, provide accommodations for out-of-towners visiting Bell Works office tenants, and supply the retail establishments with additional customers.

The developer is in the process of expanding to the Chicago area, where, with Gorlin’s help, he is transforming a 1990s-era former AT&T campus in Hoffman Estates, Illinois. It remains to be seen if the metroburb formula can be successfully exported to other markets. But it offers an intriguing model for repurposing America’s many vacant office parks—some of which have thrilling architecture—while bringing a bit of the city to suburbia.

Credits

Architect: Alexander Gorlin Architects — Alexander Gorlin, principal; Cyrus Sarrafha, project manager; Vincent Linarello, senior architect; Daniel Schuetz, senior architectural designer; Reginald Dorcé, architectural designer; Derek Supinsky, junior designer
Associate Architects: G3 Architecture, IA Interior Architects
Interior Designer: NPZ Style+Decor — Paola Zamudio
Consultants: Becht Engineering, OLA Consulting Engineers, AKF Group, Stantec (m/e/p); laufsed (structural); Heritage Consulting Group (landmark filing); Melillo + Bauer Associates (landscape)
General Contractor: Structure Tone, Greenfield Construction Group
Client: Somerset Development
Size: 2 million square feet
Cost: $200 million
Completion date: 2019

Sources

Interior Glass Partitions: metro-wall
Photovoltaics: Onyx Solar
Ceramic Tile: Nemo

In addressing the gnarly question of how to add onto a building in a cemetery that is a historic landmark, architects William Rawn Associates of Boston came up with a well-known modernist, but still timeless, answer: glass. Bigelow Chapel, an early 19th-century Gothic Revival structure in Mount Auburn Cemetery, on the edge of Cambridge, Massachusetts, needed an extension to accommodate memorial services, weddings, receptions, meetings, and a crematory. But because it is perched on a small plot on the top of a hill overlooking the 175-acre landscaped garden and burial grounds, created in 1831, any new construction threatened to obscure its picturesque architecture, which is distinguished by its stolid Quincy-granite walls and minaret-like spires.

The original 6,300-square-foot building, realized in 1846, was designed by Dr. Jacob Bigelow, a physician and botanist and Harvard professor who was one of the founders of Mount Auburn (although the architectural drawings were executed by a local practitioner). Its 12-foot-diameter stained-glass rose window above the south-facing entrance and its simple groin-vaulted interior awed visitors attending services throughout the decades. But by 2016, it was clear that the chapel, which seats 75 people, could use more space, as well as benefit from upgraded acoustics, accessibility, and lighting, not to mention the construction of a more energy-efficient crematory.

Since Rawn Associates had been preparing a master plan for the cemetery, the firm’s principal for design, Samuel Lasky, suggested going after the commission for revitalizing the chapel. The solution is a new square-U-shaped addition that wraps around the east, north, and west ends of the chapel. Its most visible portion is a one-story butt-jointed steel-framed glass pavilion jutting out into the pastoral landscape above a blueschist foundation wall. The low-iron glass emphasizes the sense of transparency, while a skylight separating the addition from the chapel’s stone wall illuminates the pavilion’s new east entrance and accessibility ramp.

Most striking for visitors to the new extension, with its beech floor and stainless-steel lolly columns, is the extraordinary panorama it affords of the surrounding gardens, forests, and lawns, marked by monuments and tombstones for such notable figures as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Buckminster Fuller buried beneath.

On the northwest corner of the 4,100-square-foot expansion, new schist walls enclose the state-of-the-art crematory. While the blueschist’s color is similar to the original gray granite, the architects changed the scale of the stone coursing to help distinguish old from new construction.

Although visitors enter the east leg of the U, the funeral personnel use a glazed vestibule to the west of the original south entrance (and its newly restored rose window) to reach the crematory. “Separating the public from daily operations is an important advantage of the new scheme,” says Gus Fraser, vice president of preservation and facilities at Mount Auburn.

The crematory is not a new feature of Bigelow: the original was installed in the chapel’s basement in 1899—the first such facility in a cemetery in New England—when Willard Sears, the architect for the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, renovated the chapel. (In 1898, he also designed the cemetery’s larger, 160-seat Joseph Story Chapel, of reddish sandstone, near the entrance.)

While cremations were unusual at the turn of the 20th century, over the years the acceptance of the practice increased, so that today Bigelow’s facility performs 1,200 annually. Since the “retorts,” as the furnaces are called, had not been replaced since the 1970s (when the crematory was moved from the basement to the main floor’s northwest corner), Rawn Associates installed computer-controlled ones that require less natural gas and less time for the process.

The team also created a viewing room, where family and friends can gather before the coffin—placed on a stainless-steel-tablelike “charger”—is rolled into the stainless-steel-clad furnace that is embedded in an anigré wood–clad wall.

Anigré covers most of the intimately scaled viewing room, where windows provide glimpses of the trees, and a glass wall reveals an interior garden inserted between the chapel’s altar and the viewing room. Clerestory windows admit additional daylight, resulting in a luminously calm space.

“Mount Auburn has always been forward-thinking,” Lasky notes, referring to its significance as the first parklike cemetery created in the U.S. and one at the forefront of dignified venues for cremations. “It was important for us to convey this vitality with a highly contemporary design, while not covering up the older structure or dominating the landscape,” he adds. And the architects succeeded: the recent renovation and expansion underscore the progressiveness of Mount Auburn’s mission with suitable elegance, grace, and aplomb.

Credits

Architect: William Rawn Associates — Samuel Lasky, principal for design; Ellie Radich, Rob Wear, Andrew Jonic, Eric Rutgers, William Rawn, Adam Weber, team
Consultants: Halvorson Design Partnership (landscape); mcginley Kalsow & Associates (preservation architects, rose window); Serpentino Stained and Leaded Glass Studio (rose window); Building Envelope Technologies (envelope); Horton Lees Brogden Lighting Design (lighting); CSL Consulting (owner’s project manager)
Engineers: lemessurier Consultants (structural); Rist-Frost-Shumway Engineering (m/e/p/fp/civil/av/it); Haley & Aldrich (geotechnical); Amec Foster Wheeler (environmental)
General Contractor: Shawmut Design and Construction
Client: Mount Auburn Cemetery
Size: 10,400 square feet (including original building)
Cost: $15 million
Completion date: December 2018

Sources

GLASS: Viracon
Skylights: Acurlite Structural Skylights
Paints and Stains: Sherwin-Williams
Acoustical Ceiling: USG Ensemble Ceiling; Topakustik
Floor and Wall Tile: Porcelanosa, Casalgrande Special Interior Finishes: Junckers Hardwood (flooring); Goldray Glass (interior wall panels); Kadee Industries (perimeter floor grill)

Situated just ABOUT as far north in Italy as you can go, Bolzano, the capital of the country’s autonomous South Tyrol province, has its charm, with a Medieval center composed of winding arcaded streets and an impressive cathedral. In contrast is a nearby industrial zone, which, in its sprawling grittiness, offers a foil to the Alpine peaks that embrace the city. The district has its own history as a relic of the Fascist period. When Mussolini was trying to Italianize South Tyrol—previously part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and annexed by Italy following World War I—he promoted industrialization here in the hope of outnumbering the German-speaking population with Italian immigrants.

The Montecatini aluminum factory (eventually to become Italy’s largest) was the first plant to open in Bolzano, in 1938, followed by numerous other heavy industries. However, declining production over the decades led to the plant (then Alumix) being largely decommissioned in the early 1990s, with the foundries demolished. The province purchased a 22-acre parcel of the 50-acre campus shortly after, prompting a master plan and a debate about the future use of the land and its structures. In 2004, the factory’s four vacant main buildings were listed as historic monuments. All designed in-house by the Montecatini company, they included two transformer plants (BZ1 and BZ2) as well as two small buildings that housed management, a caretaker’s quarters, and a canteen. In 2007, the provincial administration launched a competition to reimagine the property. Initially, the brief included a museum, but it was later amended to dedicate the whole program to a research and innovation center to encourage Bolzano’s evolution from an industrial hub to an enclave of high-tech. The result is a sophisticated new campus that preserves the understated facades and soaring interiors of the beautiful Rationalist architecture here while creating a highly sustainable modern workplace that continues the tradition of industry in Bolzano. With their scheme, the winners of the 2007 competition, Bolzano architects Claudio Lucchin & Architetti Associati and the Milan office of Chapman Taylor, have reinvented the complex as NOI Techpark—NOI standing for “Nature of Innovation” and also South Tyrol dialect for “new” and the Italian word for “us.” As a research and innovation center, the campus brings together the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano with private business and research institutions (that focus on sustainability and food production) through a diverse collection of labs, workspaces, and meeting facilities that occupy BZ1 and BZ2 as well as a new building that links the two. Housing over 60 businesses and 600 researchers, the campus will eventually expand to include five additional new buildings.

A native of Bolzano, architect Claudio Lucchin has a personal connection to the project. “We all have had a relative or friend who worked in this factory, which is a piece of the history of this city,” he says. He was immediately captivated by the challenge of developing the complex as a workplace for a new generation, hoping to “redefine the idea of what a factory is while retaining the genius loci of the place.” Gianfranco Lizzul, the director of Chapman Taylor Milan, points out the importance of creating a scheme that would architecturally express the site’s new use. “The project combines contemporary Italian design with a wonderful piece of Bolzano’s industrial heritage,” he says. While the competition brief mandated retaining the exteriors of the concrete and clinker brick buildings, as well as related artifacts, such as a concrete water tower and reflecting pool, there was ample room for invention within and around the historic fabric.

Entering the complex, you pass between the two more domestically scaled mixed-use buildings—one of which Lucchin’s team has converted into a restaurant and café, the other of which has yet to be repurposed—into a broad plaza. Directly behind the prominent water tower is the new building, dubbed the Black Monolith in deference to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Clad in dark gray aluminum foam (a nod to the site’s past life) with ribbon windows stretching across its north facade, and appearing to float atop polished-aluminum-clad columns, the structure (which tilts 2 degrees from front to back) strikes a mysterious—though sympathetic—pose between the two historic buildings. The main entry to the complex is tucked beneath the Black Monolith’s big overhang and leads into a series of casual meeting spaces and offices. Illuminated by a skylit courtyard at its center and generous glazing on its south end, the interiors are surprisingly bright and airy.

The new building connects on its upper levels to BZ1 to the east, which has as its centerpiece a grand overhead-crane hall lined with laboratories, workshops, and offices for start-ups. BZ2, to the west, similarly retains its original central hall, which is now flanked by labs, offices, and facilities for the university and other institutions. To provide the large-scale specialized labs required here, the team excavated the ground-floor level 4½ feet and dug a north-facing courtyard to bring in daylight; on the main floor, they inserted lab spaces within the existing reinforced concrete structural grid. The interventions here, including the ground-up building, do not lean on historicism but, rather, read as distinctly new. Underscoring this, many interior insertions float within the spaces, detached from the walls and ceilings, such as BZ2’s raised platform-like media library as well as the stacked steel-and-glass incubator offices that the team installed within the original concrete frame of BZ1’s triple-height power-transformer room. In places, new elements are painted black to contrast with the original surfaces, which are left white. While the retention of original structure and elements throughout recalls the complex’s former use, it is the spatial preservation that captures the spirit most potently. Even when chopping up some of the cavernous rooms to provide offices and labs, the team, through its abundant use of glass and the creation of breathing spaces between old and new, has maintained the sublime cathedral-like quality of these interior volumes.

Complying with stringent local CasaClima sustainability practices, NOI Techpark has achieved an A rating, the highest possible, as well as LEED-ND for neighborhood development. And the Black Monolith is a nearly Zero Energy building (nZEB): besides recovering wastewater from the neighboring factory’s production process for heating and cooling, the building employs automated operable windows to extract heat at night during the summer months, requiring less air-conditioning during the day. Rooftop PVs meet about 70 percent of the Black Monolith’s electric needs, and plans are in place for future runoff recovery for landscape and green-roof irrigation. In addition to employing standard daylighting and recycling practices, NOI Techpark looks to employee transport: hydrogen buses service the complex, and surrounding bicycle paths have been expanded. With the major and ongoing transformation of this historic campus, the architects have addressed—practically and symbolically—the evolution of industry from the creation of objects to the formulation of ideas. Just as the original buildings, in their grace and solemnity, once elevated the process of production, the intervention here communicates—in its own language—a reverence for innovation, and suggests that the future always springs from the past.

Credits

Architects: Claudio Lucchin & Architetti Associati — Claudio Lucchin, Angelo Rinaldo, Daniela Varnier, Roberto Gionta, Michele Capra, Marco Mozzarelli, Matteo Torresi, Alessandra Fella, Stefania Masuino Chapman Taylor — Alessandro Stroligo, Fabiona Minas, Gianfranco Lizzul, Erika Della Rocca, Vittorio Caponetto Mauro Dell’Orco Andrea Cattacin
Engineers: Ingenieurteam Bergmeister (structural); Manens-Tifs (systems)
General Contractors: Volcan; Bettiol; Metall Ritten
Client: Province of Bolzano Bozen
Size: 137,000 square feet
Cost: $64 million
Completion date: 2017–18 (phased)

Sources

Curtain Wall: Schüco
Entrances: Dorma
Acoustical Ceilings: Celenit
Elevators: Schindler
Lighting: Zumtobel, Atena Lux

An integral part of Manhattan’s Stuyvesant Square Historic District, Friends Seminary has been dealing with growing pains for decades, with an increasing number of kindergarten-through-12th-grade students sharing tight quarters in a disparate group of 19th- and 20th-century buildings. Now the campus has room to breathe, due to a meticulous renovation and expansion by Kliment Halsband Architect (KHA), completed last September, that treads gently on the old-world charm of its setting.

Bordered on the east by the verdant square, the independent Quaker day school, founded in 1786, still occupies one of three landmarked masonry buildings, reminiscent of Federal and Greek Revival styles, that the Society of Friends built here in 1860. (A meetinghouse and administrative building, also remain in use by the religious organization.) As with many city institutions, growth here was challenged by a tight real-estate market as well as the area’s city landmark designation in 1975, which limits construction.

There has been some development over the years. In 1964 (before the landmark designation), two of eight 1852 Anglo-Italianate row houses, west of the original school house, were razed to build Hunter Hall, a four-story building by Chapman, Evans and Delehanty that created a campus quadrant around a rear courtyard. In 2006, architect Margaret Helfand was allowed to insert a small vertical core that connected Hunter Hall and the 1860s complex and created a steel-and-glass lobby and new library.

By 2014, Friends Seminary had bought three additional townhouses and linked them to each other provisionally until funds and approvals could be acquired for a proper addition. According to KHA principal Frances Halsband, “The buildings were horrible.” None of the floor levels aligned and the facades were in disrepair. Charged with renovating these properties and the 1960s building to provide flexible, accessible space, making seamless transitions among them, Halsband recommended restoring the landmarked brick facades but demolishing everything behind them to build a single structure. The design team then developed a two-phase scheme that would allow the school to operate throughout the project while more than doubling the size of the facility, with a generous addition for the middle and lower schools in Hunter Hall and a distinct upper school in the townhouses.

Working with structural engineer Silman, the architects first added a play roof and two classroom floors to Hunter Hall, which would serve as swing space during Phase 2. “We wanted to minimize demolition inside Hunter Hall, so the structure behind the townhouse facades actually contains most of the lateral support system for both buildings,” explains senior project engineer Jim Villano. “But we had to build the addition on top of Hunter Hall first—so we also put temporary lateral braces at the front and back of that building.” To further reduce impact on the existing school building’s operation during construction of the new upper floors, the crew reinforced its perimeter columns from the exterior, accessing them by removing slender portions of the brick on the north and south elevations. Likewise, they used full-story trusses on the new fifth and sixth floors, to limit disrupting the existing space on the fourth. Once this work was near completion, the permanent global lateral system of moment and brace frames was erected within the townhouses, and the facade and a neighboring party wall, west of the school, stabilized with broad concrete bench footings and temporary shoring at the facade for the restoration and construction.

The revived 19th-century facade appears as it must have more than 150 years ago but conceals a fresh 29,000-square-foot upper-school wing that, like Hunter Hall, tops out at approximately 70 feet, more than 5 feet below the maximum height for this landmarked area. It, too, rises to six stories but is crowned on the roof with a greenhouse instead of a play space. To comply with New York City setback requirements, the additions gracefully step away from view and are virtually invisible at street level. The new structure is also about 5 feet behind the historic facade, which is supported by a series of vertical trusses in the interstitial space. Visible through windows in adjacent internal walls, this impressive bit of engi­neering is meant to inspire the school’s 780 students. A sloped skylight at the top transmits daylight down through that narrow volume and adjacent interior spaces. “At night,” says the school’s principal, Bo Lauder, “It emits a cheerful glow from within the building.”

For the new upper school of 282 students, Halsband exploited every inch available to her. She used Collaborative for High Performance Schools criteria (or CHPS, a national program to improve learning environments) as a design standard for enhanced building sustainability and occupant well-being. The entrance, accessible by a gentle gradient outside, opens to a terrazzo-clad lobby. Inside, the floors are organized around a new stairwell and elevator core at the juncture of the old and new wings. Taking advantage of zoning that permits community-facility projects to be built within the rear yard of a lot, the architect filled out the site with a near-22-foot-high extension at the ground floor. The 30-foot-wide by 63-foot-long columnless space is used for school-wide music, dance, and theater classes, while an operable, impact-resistant glass wall on the courtyard opens for indoor/outdoor assemblies and events. On its roof, a garden terrace, supported by beefy steel trusses and beams and bolstered by acoustically isolated slabs, gives the older students a peaceful outdoor setting for studying or hanging out. Located off the third floor, this 2,000-square-foot patio is accessed through a new upper-school commons (or lounge) inside. A series of bays, clad in zinc, punctuate the rear of the building, referring to the area’s rowhouses and creating cozy interior nooks in classrooms.

During a school tour, the teens were lounging in the commons or mingling at their lockers, which overlook the facade. There was a cheerful sense of calm in the ample space, and Lauder seemed delighted: “For two years we were all in one building—pretty tight. Now it feels as if I could see a tumbleweed coming down the hallway.”

Credits

Architect: Kliment Halsband Architects — Frances Halsband, founding partner; Michael A. Nieminen, David Whitehill, partners; Nicholas Wan, Dalvine Charlton, Simone Meeks, Lara Makhlouf, design team
Engineers: Silman (structural); Altieri (m/e/p/fp); Langan (geotechnical)
Construction Manager: AECOM Tishman
Consultants: Todd Rader + Amy Crews (landscape); Tillotson Design Associates (lighting); Jablonski Building Conservation (restoration); Jaffe Holden (acoustics); Steven Winter Associates (sustainability)
Client: Friends Seminary
Size: 76,500 square feet
Cost: withheld
Completion date: September 2019

Sources

Structural System: Metropolitan Walters
Masonry: Acme Brick
Metal: Accurate Specialty Metal Fabrication (panels); Kawneer (curtain wall); Rheinzink (cladding and roofing)
Facade Restoration: Northern Bay Contractors
Fenestration: Skyline Windows; Oldcastle BuildingEnvelope (skylights)
Glass Folding Wall: Nanawall
Elevator: Thyssenkrupp
Building Systems: Johnson Controls; Mitsubishi Electric

Opened in 1965, the Carnegie Main Library building, later known as the Ben West Library, was a rare Midcentury Modern gem in downtown Nashville. It fell into disuse by the turn of the 21st century when, in 2001, a much larger Neoclassical structure, designed by Robert A. M. Stern Architects and located a couple of blocks away, replaced it. Mainly abandoned since then, apart from a brief period when it housed the mayor’s offices and city council members’, the former library, unlike other buildings of its era in the city, narrowly escaped the wrecking ball. A landmark designation in 2015 saved the 42,000-square-foot modernist marble pile—for which its architect, Bruce Crabtree of the once-prominent local firm Taylor & Crabtree, had held particular affection. But a cumbersome ownership arrangement of the ³⁄₄-acre property, involving both the city and private entities, as well as its new historic status—which scared away developers but attracted creative enterprises and nonprofits that couldn’t afford it—complicated its sale for years.

In an ironic turn of events, Hastings Architecture, which had advised a potential buyer early on, ended up purchasing the building in 2017 for $4 million. “At one point, we were looking at it and I laughed, ‘This would be a great building for us,’ ” recalls Dave Powell, who, along with his partners David Bailey and William Hastings, made the surprising decision to move their design firm (now 85 people) into the rescued real estate, which is set among several government buildings, including the SOM-designed Tennessee Tower (1970) across the street.

Since 2003, Hastings had maintained its office in an 1895 warehouse near the Country Music Hall of Fame, an area that has developed into a boisterous entertainment district. In recent years—coinciding with Nashville’s construction boom—the rapidly growing firm could no longer comfortably fit in that space, and was happy to leave the traffic and noise behind.

As architects who had previously renovated older buildings, including Nashville’s storied Ryman Auditorium, the partners knew to expect some surprises with the restoration, but even they did not anticipate how big and long a project—construction lasted 14 months and cost $11 million—this would turn out to be. The city had already remediated the structure for hazardous materials during its temporary tenancy from 2007 to 2008, but not much else had been done to the building in more than 50 years. The architects had to replace a greater number of the ¹⁄₂-inch-thick Cherokee white marble curtain wall panels than they had foreseen—up to 75 percent on the pilasters and 30 percent overall. “We started to notice a lot of bowing,” says Bailey. Previously load-bearing, the new panels, from the same quarry in Georgia as the originals, now are ³⁄₄ inches thick and supported by stainless-steel clips. Panels that were not replaced, as well as the original terrazzo floors, were cleaned and repaired.

The building’s most notable feature, a series of full-height arching windows that wrap the main level, also needed to be replaced. The openings along the south facade originally contained precast concrete infill panels to obscure a nightclub across the parking lot from view of library visitors. The landmarks committee was not initially onboard to have Hastings substitute those infill panels with glass. “We eventually found a clever detail on the original drawings that allowed for doing just that in the future,” says Powell, which convinced the committee that it was fulfilling the vision of the original architect, who died in 2014, before the landmark designation. Both the main level and top floor above it now feature double-glazed high-performance insulated glass. Below them—what Hastings refers to as “the dungeon”—are parking, mechanical and electrical equipment, archives, and a future model shop.

In renovating the interior, the architects gutted the entire building and removed plaster that had been applied to the concrete. “We stripped it to the bones and only put back what was necessary,” says Powell. They reconfigured the floor plan to open up the core and create: a gallery-like central lobby that leads to the firm’s office, which occupies the southern half of the building; a 1,500-square-foot community room, called the Athenaeum, that is often used by government agencies as part of the purchase agreement; and two tenant spaces—another, smaller architecture studio on the top floor, and a large talent agency on the north side that is in the process of moving in.

The 20-foot-high, daylight-filled main level is now a soaring studio space, its ceiling exposed and streaked with long LED tubes, diagonally positioned to mimic the arrangement of the original book stacks. More studio space, meeting rooms, a material library, a virtual-reality room, and private offices for Hastings are located upstairs on the top level, where occupants can escape outside to a balcony encircling the building.

Both levels offer panoramic views over Nashville, since the building sits on a hill. But what’s most noticeable in the cityscape these days are the construction cranes. Within just feet of Hastings’s new home are future buildings for Amazon and Nashville tech giant Asurion. Those developments will no doubt transform the area, a change that the partners at Hastings—having already disrupted the existing fabric of the stodgy neighborhood by introducing creative offices—welcome. And while Hastings may be an agent of change in this part of town, it became so by preserving its past.

Credits

Architect: Hastings Architecture
Engineers: Power Management Corporation (m/e/p); EMC Structural Engineers (structural); Barge Cauthen & Associates (civil); Steve Durr Designs (acoustic)
Consultants: Hodgson Douglas (landscape); Charles M. Salter Associates (acoustic)
General Contractor: Carter Group
Client: Hastings Architecture
Size: 42,000 square feet
Cost: $15 million
Completion date: June 2019

Sources

Glass: Guardian, Oldcastle BuildingEnvelope
Entrances: Tubelite
Hardware: Assa Abloy, Rockwood
Plumbing: Kohler, Duravit
Carpet: Interface, Shaw