Knapp's special section: Transform & restore

The gales of November 2012 lashed the rusting hull of Lansing´s biggest and most beautiful commercial downtown icon, the Knapp´s Department Store building.

A lifeline was on its way, but time was running out.

The biggest example of Streamline Moderne architecture in the Midwest, moored like a massive ocean liner at the corner of Washtenaw Street and Washington Square, had been taking on water for decades.

The building´s most significant historic asset — its bright, zooming yellow and blue skin — was failing. The lusciously layered rows of porcelain plates and glass bricks had not passed the test of time.

The plates were corroded and bloated by 75 years of Michigan showers, scorchers and snowstorms. A few had fallen off. The glass bricks were breaking apart and taking on water. The building would have to be flayed and re-skinned, and soon.

Under the skin lay another big challenge: the rest of the building. Behind its opaque shell, Knapp´s was a big black box, designed to isolate shoppers in a wonderland of browsing and buying. To bring light into the space and make it fit for modern office and residential use, the entire slab would have to be sliced and diced in a bold way.

Preserve and transform — the goals seemed contradictory.

"We´ve done historic renovation and we´ve done mixed use development, but not all together at the same time," marveled Joe Durfee, project manager for Knapp´s con tractor Granger Construction. "All the unique challenges that come with both kinds of projects was melded into one project."

The lead architect at Knapp´s was Lis Knibbe of Quinn Evans, the Ann Arbor firm that has restored historic landmarks around the country, like Lansing´s Ottawa Street Power Station, Michigan´s Capitol and even Washington, D.C´s Old Executive Office Building.

Knibbe called Knapp´s "the most complex adaptive re-use we´ve ever done, and the most significant transformation of a building, and we´ve done some wild things."

Grab your scorecard and a stubby pencil with tooth marks. Here´s how they did it.

FAILED MARRIAGE

Late in the winter of 2012-13, passersby were shocked to see a skeleton of concrete and steel at the corner of Washtenaw and Washington. Snow whistled through the building. Some people wondered: Were they tearing it down?

For 75 years, thousands of shiny, stylish panels of yellow and blue made the Knapp´s building gleam like a great big diner at the heart of downtown. (There was an actual diner downstairs.) The romance never faded, even as the building sat vacant for years, beginning in 2001.

But the lovely facade concealed a bad marriage.

"The treatment of the porcelain skin was the most complicated and controversial part of the project," Robbert McKay of the state´s historic preservation office declared.

The trade name for the panels was Maul Macotta. Pete Kramer, another principal in the Knapp´s project and a 30-year veteran of the construction business, described them as "porcelain baked on steel." Behind the panels, metal tabs sunk into about four inches of concrete.

"We can´t quite tell how it was sequenced, but the steel and the concrete became one," Kramer said.

It was an unhappy union. The tabs and the sheets rusted and the panels started to slide off the building. Some of the panels were down to bare concrete.

In modern construction, water and vapor barriers keep the elements out. The Maul Macotta at Knapp´s didn´t have that protection. The crumble and rust quickened in the 1970s, when insulation was added to the walls, trapping moisture in the concrete. The concrete froze and thawed by turns, slowly tearing the panels apart.

Over the years, well-intentioned exterior fixes, including extensive caulking, trapped more moisture in the walls. The ribbons of black caulk made the ultra smooth building look like it was crawling with worms.

The design team´s first plan was to restore the metal panels and put them back on the building with modern shields underneath.

Workers tried chipping off the old concrete and welding new pins to them, but there was no way of fastening the pins without popping off the enamel coating.

A call went out to one of the last remaining commercial porcelain specialists in the country, Cherokee Porcelain in Knoxville, Tenn. Cherokee built and installed the famous whitepaneled walls for hundreds of White Castle hamburger shops around the country.

Cherokee´s Frank Corum, an 81-year-old veteran of the vanishing porcelain business, was bemused when Knapp´s designers asked him whether the panels on the building could be re-coated. Porcelain, he told them, is a glassy concoction that is fired several times at 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit. "You can´t bring a furnace big enough to put that building in," Corum said drily.

POLYMER PASTRAMI

After 18 months of tests, no combination of new replacement panels and old panels looked feasible.

It was a low point for the restoration team.

"Here was this historic icon that was in such need of repair that you just couldn´t salvage it," Kramer said.

Robbert McKay of the State Historic Preservation Office paid a visit to the building. Even he could see it was hopeless.

"I made them jump through a lot of hoops to prove that [the old] material wasn´t salvageable," McKay said.

Bradley Cambridge, project manager for Quinn Evans, and his team reluctantly stepped onto "the path of full replacement."

A few of the old panels were saved for a future art project to raise funds for Downtown Lansing Inc..

The rest were scrapped.

Wrapping Knapp´s in a new shell was a daunting prospect. For Knibbe, the undertaking was unique, and even had philosophical overtones. What, exactly, is historic about a historic building?

Is it the concept or the material?

"We basically replicated the skin of the building," Knibbe said. "But in this case, the building — the design — would be lost if we didn´t. So they let us do this and still consider it a historic building."

David Rockafellow is a project manager at Architectural Metals, the Portland, Michiganbased company charged with performing the fullbody skin transplant at Knapp´s.

The job was so big that Rockafellow turned to one of the world´s major builders of metal walls, Sobotec Ltd. of Hamilton, Ontario, to make the panels. Sobotec specializes in glitzy projects, from the new crazy-quilt Westin Hotel in New York´s Times Square to innumerable car dealerships coatedwith shiny silver squares.

The new panels at Knapp´s are sandwiches made of two thin sheets of aluminum with an inner pastrami of polymer ("some kind of rigid, black plastic-y stuff," McKay said). It´s hardly an experimental system. The only feature of the panels that isn´t in general use is a delicate frame of aluminum trim, crafted to match the Knapp´s originals.

The failed porcelain-steel-and-concrete experiment of original Knapp´s architects Edwin Bowd and Orlie Munson taught everyone a hard lesson. The Knapp´s panels are backed by three layers of materials, none of which are concrete: good old Tyvek for a weather barrier, a gypsum panel called DensGlass for structure and a generous layer of spray foam insulation. Michigan´s myriad forms of precipitation go into the joints between the panels, say goodbye and drain away.

Workers put up 2,733 panels in all, with a few raw plates left over in case spares have to be cut. Technicians had to measure carefully, because there was less than an eighth of an inch wriggle room for each row of panels.

To give the corner column of panels the sexy bend needed for the prow of the building at the intersection of Washington and Washtenaw, the panels were fitted into a giant bending machine at the Ontario factory and calibrated precisely to the calculus of the corner.

McKay was impressed with the results. "How do we use modern materials when we discover fundamental flaws in the old ones?" he asked. "That same concept of being at the leading edge has driven this project to be something quite remarkable."

PAPERWEIGHTS AND FISH TANKS

From end to end, the layers of yellow and blue at Knapp´s are frosted with layers of prismatic glass blocks, perfectly suited for a department store. They let sunlight into the building, but not so much that shoppers would be distracted.

Once again, two eras and styles of construction — 20thcentury opacity and 21st-century transparency — were at total war. Unless Knapp´s were to be turned into a correctional facility or a porn studio, the smoky bricks would never do.

"That visual connection to the outside was crucial to office tenants," Cambridge said.

Here, the team got lucky. Like the panels, the glass blocks were pretty much shot and had to be replaced. Lead seals had failed and they were taking on water.

McKay was so happy to hear this seemingly unwelcome news he still has a grimy keepsake on his desk at the Michigan Historic Preservation Office.

"I´m sitting here, looking at my piece of original Knapp´s glass block," McKay said thoughtfully, like Hamlet regarding the skull of Horatio. "The defect in the original material was, in part, what made the whole project possible."

Preservation and transformation were beginning to look less contradictory.

The old glass blocks made way for new ones that would let the sun shine in and make office tenants happy.

So many variables were involved in the new skin, from the wall panels to the glass bricks, that a full-scale, floor-to-floor mockup of a wall section was built at the Architectural Metals shop in Portland. McKay said that´s very unusual in the historic renovation projects.

The section looked exactly like the original skin. McKay gave the team the go-ahead to scale up and go to work on the real thing.

SLIDING DOWN THE GARBAGE CHUTE

There were surprises along the way as demolition worked its way westward in winter 2012-13.

Early in the New Year, workers crossed a line where the original building met the addition built in 1947. The shell was still plated with Maul Macotta, so the wall looked continuous from the outside, but it wasn´t. On the west side, the panels were cemented to crumbly clay tile, with no steel framework.

"We had to do more demolition of the structure supporting those walls than we anticipated," Cambridge said. The clay was chipped away and hauled off and new steel was put up.

Inside the building, some interior steel was beefed up, especially where escalators were cut into the floors and removed for the renovation, but overall, the building´s bones were solid.

"That concrete was very sound," Durfee said with a touch of irony. "It fought us every step of the way."

Workers found a few unexpected nuggets. The strangest was a hidden multi-story trash chute made of heavy steel, in the form of a corkscrew-shaped slide.

"I wanted to take a ride on it," Kramer said.

As work went on around the heavy-duty trash chute, workers were amazed to find that it was stamped with the name of the original contractor, the Christman Co.

BREAKING THE CASINO

Despite the glass blocks ringing the building, the interior was still too dark for people to live or work without taking anti-depressants.

"It might as well be a casino," Kramer said. "They didn´t want you to know it was dark and time to go home."

Knibbe´s team devised a bold solution. An atrium with skywalks would be cut right through the building.

Architect Brandon Fiske of Quinn Evans devised an airy, stylish space with walkways canted at interesting angles.

"He really made that atrium sing," Knibbe, his boss on the project, said.

But it was easier drawn than done.

Workers had to cut out and reinforce four slabs of concrete, one on each floor. They worked from the top down, so the floor below could catch the debris. It´s not the way the Three Stooges would have done it, but it was safer.

Work began with the roof deck, which was easily cut by hand, being thinner than the inner floors. Beginning with the fifth floor, a jackhammer was brought to the task.

It felt strange to demolish perfectly good stuff, and the safety factor worried Durfee.

"You´ve got a sound slab, and you don´t have any fall risks, and all of a sudden you´re creating a major fall risk right in the middle of the work area," he said.

On each floor, a worker with a concrete saw cut a checkerboard pattern of three-by-three-foot squares. The jackhammer punched the concrete to bits. Plenty of reinforcing steel, above and below the concrete, made the job even harder. The steel and concrete chunks were separated into piles, carted off and recycled.

"The atrium was an amazing idea that added a lot to the building, but you don´t normally do something like that," Durfee said.

When the light came through, project manager Nick Eyde felt the renovation turned a corner. "You could see it starting to look like the rendering," Eyde said. "That skylight provided that moment of, ´Here we are.´"

The opening of the atrium was Cambridge´s best day, too.

"When they started cutting the floors open, you could start to visualize how the spaces would work together," he said.

Along with the atrium, one more design trick helped make the Knapp´s building livable for modern tenants. All the floors, except the main sales floor, were raised 24 inches.

The raised floor solved two problems. It brought the high windows closer to eye level and made space for state-of-theart utility spaghetti and heating and cooling vents.

Of course, it also caused problems. "All of a sudden you´ve got elevators and stairs that don´t line up," McKay said.

But by then, Durfee was used to solving jigsaw puzzles. The joints in the original and 1947 addition had settled differently and had to be tested for strength. That made it harder to make the new interior finishes plumb and level.

"The building now has completely modern mechanical and electrical systems," Durfee said. "It required a whole lot of coordination with the engineers, the Eydes, the contracting team. It was extremely, extremely difficult."

ORIGINAL ARTIFACTS

After replacing the skin of the Knapp´s building and reconfiguring its interior, it might seem that little could be left of the building´s original stuff, but that´s not so.

Most of the structural concrete and steel is original, along with the non-showy side and back walls of brick and mortar.

Streamline Moderne and Art Deco lovers will find several examples of original detailing in place, even on the new skin. Two vertical columns of dark blue, or pilasters, thrust upward on each side of the rounded corner entrance. The windows in the pilasters are original, and so are the flag-like "K" insignia inscribed into them.

The insignia were too stubbornly fastened to the building´s frame, and made of too many pieces, to take down. They were cleaned in place (some 30 feet off the ground), covered with protective plywood and steadied with epoxy anchors as the building´s skin was torn off around them and the new skin installed.

Look closely between the street-level windows and you´ll see delicate floral filigree of stamped aluminum, also original to the building. Inside, looping banisters and rails of gold and silver are among the most elegant remnants of department store days.

The original feature that amazed Durfee the most was the store´s original terrazzo floor, covered during construction with dirt and debris.

For a brief time, after the old roof was removed but before the new one was put in place, rain got into the building. "It ran to the first floor and cleared the dust and gunk and grime off," he said. "You could see the potential in that floor."

After two weeks off site, Durfee came back and found the main entrance lobby off Washtenaw Street freshly buffed. He could almost smell the fragrance from the Knapp´s perfume department, which used to be near the door.

"It just blew me away," Durfee said. "How good, after all these years, that floor could still look."

MIND CANDY

The word "restoration" is not quite right for the Knapp´s project. It looks like it did in 1938, but looks are deceiving.

A few blocks away, the same architects who designed the Knapp´s project are busy renovating the shell of the Michigan State Capitol and a conference room in the House of Representatives. The Capitol job is a "very careful restoration," Knibbe said, while Knapp´s is a "transformation."

"In buildings like the Capitol, you´re really trying to hide what you´re doing," Knibbe said. "In the Knapp´s building, we´re taking the best of what´s there and moving it forward, adding design elements like the atrium."

Transformation was inevitable, Knibbe´s colleague, Brad Cambridge, said.

"The job is to take a building designed for one use, make it fit a secondary use and extend its lifespan," he said.

Bruce Kopytek, a Detroit-based architect and department store historian, compared the Knapp´s restoration to his ancestral city of Warsaw, Poland, most of which was flattened in World War II.

"Warsaw completely rebuilt its old town, working from paintings from the 1600s, but found ways to incorporate new housing in the old tenements," Kopytek said.

"It´s the same thing with Knapp´s. It´s not the same stuff that was there when Grandma shopped at the store, but they´ve re-created the beauty of it when it was new and will last a lot longer. It´s the best possible solution."

Architecture critic Amanda Harrell-Seyburn said the work at Knapp´s is a model for future restorations.

"Having an attractive building that´s still relevant today is more important than than saving material that´s been compromised," she said.

Nick Eyde, the project manager for the Eyde Co., is ecstatic.

"We knew we wanted residential, office and retail," Eyde said. "It was up to them to figure out how to take an old department store building and make it functional for all three uses, and make it interesting. And they did."

WHY BOTHER?

The Knapp´s team of designers and builders turned themselves blue and yellow, not to create a new cultural icon, but to retrace every curve and line from a 1937 design. Why?

"It´s hard to put it into words. Old buildings speak to us in a way that´s special," Knibbe said. "They tie us to the past. It´s mind candy, visual candy."

As a historic preservation architect, Knibbe´s ultimate goal is to help make cities work, and cities still have a lock on the great buildings of the world.

"Those buildings are what makes downtown Lansing different from a shopping mall," Knibbe said. Try to re-create it and "you get Disneyland."

Pete Kramer has worked on a lot of new builds (including the Disneyland-ish Eastwood Towne Center), but he said Knapp´s is a special case.

"Fifty or 100 years from now, will we be restoring Lowe´s or Home Depots? I don´t think so," Kramer said. "Are you going to restore the Meridian Mall to its historic condition? No. This was a different time."