Brown University was looking for architects to design an $80-million home for its Warren Alpert Medical School when the economy imploded two years ago, forcing campus officials to rethink their plans. Instead of putting up a new building on an empty lot in the city’s Jewelry District, the university decided to gut and renovate an existing structure it owned just across the street—a 1928 factory where the Brier Manufacturing Company once made costume jewelry with the brand name Little Nemo.
The change of plans brought some challenges. Tenants in the building, which had been commercial office space since 1972, had to be relocated. And Ellenzweig, the architecture firm that Brown eventually hired, had to create an interior design that worked around the factory’s imposing concrete columns, which are on a 20-foot grid. But the renovation will offer the medical school all the same features it would have enjoyed in a brand-new structure, plus a little more space and, probably, a gold-level certification in the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program, known as LEED.
And the price tag? It was cut almost in half, to $45-million.
Brown, which previously renovated the nearby Speidel watchband building to serve as a molecular-medicine lab, isn’t the only institution to discover the benefits of reusing an old industrial building. Two years ago, for instance, York College of Pennsylvania moved its engineering programs into a factory—renovated to LEED-silver standards for just over $3-million—that had been home to the York Narrow Fabrics Company (among other things, the company made the red tape long associated with bureaucracies). In Philadelphia, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts has worked its way, floor by floor, through a renovation of an 11-story, 300,000-square-foot building erected in 1916 as an assembly-and-storage facility and showroom for the Gomery-Schwartz Motor Car Company.
In Chicago, a developer renovated the century-old Automatic Electric Company factory, in which some of the first automated-telephone-switching equipment was manufactured, to create 142 apartments for students at a number of local colleges. In Los Angeles, the Southern California Institute of Architecture has made its home for nearly a decade in a quarter-mile-long building from 1907 that was originally a freight terminal for the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway. A larger freight terminal—a 700,000-square-foot Philadelphia behemoth built by the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1929—now houses the University of Pennsylvania’s facilities staff on its lower levels, while the upper stories are a university-owned 252-unit apartment building called the Left Bank.
What seems likely to be the ritziest factory retrofit is one planned for a former University of California printing plant in Berkeley. After fund raising faltered for a new, $143-million art museum, university officials scrapped the plan late last year and decided instead to spend $95-million renovating and expanding the 48,000-square-foot 1939 printing plant to house the museum. The project, which could double the building’s size, will be handled by the boutique architecture firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro.
From Docks to Docs
Michael J. McCormick, Brown’s assistant vice president for planning, design, and construction, says the Little Nemo building is one of eight that Brown purchased several years ago in the Jewelry District, for decades a hub of costume-jewelry manufacturing and before that a neighborhood of ship chandlers. Now the district’s late-19th- and early-20th-century factories have become residential and commercial buildings, some of them quite elegant. And the imminent removal of an elevated highway that had cut the district off from downtown Providence is expected to be a boon to the neighborhood, he says.
The piers of the bridge that carried the highway across the Providence River are to be reused for a pedestrian crossing that will make it a 10- or 15-minute walk to Brown’s main campus. Land that had held on- and off-ramps will become a park. For medical students, a big benefit of the new location will be its proximity to Hasbro, Rhode Island, and Women & Infants Hospitals, all three located on the south side of the Jewelry District.
The finished facility will have anatomy labs, classrooms, offices, a library, social spaces for students, and a corner cafe open to the public. A rooftop terrace will offer views of the river and the main campus. Mr. McCormick says the renovation, due to be completed next summer, is expected to earn at least LEED-gold certification, in part because the project takes advantage of so much of the energy embodied in the old structure.
Factories are among the easiest buildings for colleges to recycle because they typically have high ceilings and open floors. Other kinds of buildings, though, can also be renovated for college use. The Maryland Institute College of Art has had galleries and studios in the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad’s 1896 Mount Royal passenger station since the 1960s, while the Maine College of Art occupies the former Porteous Mitchell & Braun department store in downtown Portland. And just this year, the University of Memphis’s Cecil C. Humphreys School of Law moved into that city’s elegant old U.S. Customs House, Court House, and Post Office.
But even an old factory can end up being an architectural attraction. In Providence, Ellenzweig’s plans call for cutting a new atrium in the middle of the Little Nemo building, as well as for replacing a few of the concrete columns with a large truss to accommodate a pair of open, 120-seat lecture halls. New windows will improve the exterior appearance and let passers-by peer in, so the building won’t feel cut off from the neighborhood.
Inside, many of the remaining monolithic columns will remain visible, along with the building’s striking, waffle-cut ceilings. A goal of the renovation is one that many of the other successful factory renovations have shared, Mr. McCormick says: “Let the historic building be the historic building.”