Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 8, 1990 TAG: 9007040361
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: EX1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Dalhouse jokes that his productivity dropped 25 percent while the huge construction crane was being put in place. Since then, like countless others, he has marveled at the men who climb into its lofty reaches to do their work in the company of birds.
Dalhouse has a better view of the job than most. He looks down on the site from his 15th-floor office in the Dominion Bank building. As Dominion Bankshares chairman, he also has more than a casual interest in the project, because the men are building new offices for himself and other Dominion employees.
They're building the Dominion Tower, named for the bank that will be headquartered there and will be the building's principal tenant. It is the first of several projects that city officials have called Roanoke's "connecting bridges" to the 21st century.
In addition to the tower, there will be a new office building for some 900 Norfolk Southern Corp. employees and a new parking garage. Later, there will be a pedestrian walkway across the Norfolk Southern tracks. And, on the north side of those tracks, if everything goes as planned, Hotel Roanoke is to be remodeled and a new convention center built on the site occupied by Norfolk Southern's present offices.
The result of it all, officials say, will be a downtown Roanoke that is modernized but still firmly in touch with the historic City Market that is at the city's heart.
"It'll be somewhat like New York City," said William Whitwell, chairman of Roanoke's Architectural Review Board and an art professor at Hollins College. "You'll be able to come out of a skyscraper and go into an older neighborhood. "
Taken together, Whitwell said, the bank and railroad projects constitute "one of the most positive architectural things I've seen in this city in a long time."
The new buildings will change Roanoke's skyline and subtly alter the way it feels to be downtown. They'll plug up space that used to be open. They'll do new things to sound and the light, and they'll put more people on the street.
But the city will remain a place where it's hard not to see plenty of sky and friendly mountains, even from downtown. That's part of the valley's quality of life, one of the reasons visitors give when they come back to stay. A few new buildings seem unlikely to seriously threaten the relationship between Roanoke and its setting, which is so strong that it can distort priorities in peculiar ways.
Timm Jamieson tells of a city official who stood across from the old firehouse on Church Avenue and remarked a little sadly that the view of Mill Mountain will disappear when the parking garage and Norfolk Southern building are in place.
"You weren't supposed to have the view," the official was reminded. "This a city street. You're supposed to see shops and businesses. The view is a luxury."
The official thought for a moment. Then he said, "You're right."
Good for business
Officials seem nearly as excited about the construction as about the completed work. When both the Dominion Tower and the Norfolk Southern projects are in full swing, there will be not one but five construction cranes in operation.
"We hope to bring in a lot of prospects during that time," said Brian Wishneff, who as economic development chief for the city of Roanoke knows the value of visible construction activity as a sign of economic momentum.
"You can talk all you want, but letting them see it for themselves is worth a thousand words," he said. "That'll be a wonderful marketing opportunity for the whole valley."
At a recent meeting of The Arts Council of Roanoke Valley board of directors, someone wondered whether Blue Ridge Renaissance, the 1991 valleywide arts festival, ought to be postponed in view of all the construction activity. The conclusion was no; the impression of growth and activity will be easily worth the inconvenience.
The Arts Council, in Center on Church, will have a ringside seat. The 11-story Norfolk Southern building and the new parking garage will be built right across Church Avenue from council offices.
The new buildings will muffle some of Church Street's ample sunshine, and will obscure the prime southward view of Mill Mountain from Center on Church.
On the other hand, workers in the new Norfolk Southern building will become beneficiaries of both that view and the northward view across the City Market toward Hotel Roanoke.
Work on both the $25 million Norfolk Southern office building and the $5 million parking garage is to begin in the fall.
Compatible design
Architect Bill Reynolds said the new Norfolk Southern building is designed to make a corporate statement.
"They were pretty clear that they wanted a quality building that would not overpower the city but would have a corporate presence," he said. "It will be a presence in all directions," including the view afforded passing motorists on nearby Interstate 581.
Although standing at the Church Avenue edge of the downtown historical district, the building will be oriented elsewhere. It will have a Franklin Road address, with entrances on both the Franklin and Williamson Road sides and on the west side, which will parallel the landscaped pedestrian walkway between Franklin and Church. There will be a small parking lot, with decorative plantings, on the Williamson Road side.
The rear of the building will be on the Church Avenue side. That's where delivery trucks will go and where the trash will be picked up.
Pedestrian traffic is heavy in the neighborhood, and the loading area will be recessed and partly screened by trees as a concession to the sensibilities of passersby. The railroad says dumpsters will be kept inside the building.
The building originally was to be constructed almost upon the property's western line, which borders the pedestrian walkway. That brought complaints that the building would encroach upon the view between Elmwood Park and the City Market area, and the railroad voluntarily pulled back from the line by about 10 feet.
That's not as far as some would prefer, but it seemed an acceptable tradeoff between the need to preserve the view and the railroad's need to preserve the development potential of the balance of its property.
The center part of the building will combine stone, precast elements and tinted glass. Arched windows will be set into the mansard-style roof. At the lower levels, where the building will be visible close up, natural granite and other top-quality materials will be used, and architectural detailing will be more extensive.
Throughout the building's exterior design, Reynolds said, there are deliberate architectural references to other buildings in the area for the sake of compatibility.
Dominion Tower will likewise be architecturally compatible and "in scale with its environment," Dalhouse said.
He has read enough about architecture to know that the public responds best to buildings that fit into their surroundings.
"They should look like they grew there and weren't stuck there," he said.
For the bank, one of the clinchers was photographs of the downtown area with the $40 million Dominion Tower superimposed to scale through the magic of an architect's computer. Sure enough, in views from Mill Mountain and from the north side of the railroad near Hotel Roanoke, the tower fits handily into the scene - dominant but not overpowering, architecturally distinctive but not trendy.
"We wanted a building that would not be the egotistic whimsy of an architect, but would denote a feeling of permanence and elegance that this community and Western Virginia would feel good about for a very long time," Dalhouse said. He called the tower a "signature building" for both the Roanoke-based bank and for the city, a building meant to suggest both stability and momentum.
"When it's finished some people will think it already looks old," Dalhouse said. "We think it will never look old, but will look timeless."
"Grand" is the word preferred by project designer Richard Bartlett for the effect he and his fellow architects were trying to achieve. The building's style is "neo-classical revival," he said, with the base, central shaft and top proportioned like skyscrapers of the 1920s.
The building will culminate in a spire and copper-colored roof. It will be lit at night by four 1-million-candlepower lamps, both for aesthetic effect and to protect the tower and passing aircraft from each other. (The railroad building also will be illuminated at night.)
The Dominion Tower's shaft will have recessed corners. They make the building less imposing from the pedestrian level, Bartlett said, but enhance its verticality from a distance. Non-glass portions of the shaft will be of precast concrete that will be colored to match the natural stones of the base.
As in the case of the railroad building, architectural detailing at the tower's base will be more intricate, because that is the part of the building most readily seen by passersby.
Parking space will occupy the first six floors of the tower and will extend eastward from the tower in an attached six-floor garage, giving the overall structure an L shape. The horizontal wing will end at about Wall Street. Eventually adjoining it, in the area now occupied by the antique mall in the former A&P building, is to be the atrium through which pedestrians will reach an elevated and enclosed walkway over the Norfolk Southern tracks.
`Signature building'
Architects point out that the new building's orientation will in itself work against any overshadowing of the market area. It is the relatively low parking wing that will extend toward the market, whereas the main tower will be nearly a block away at Jefferson Street and Salem Avenue.
"The design shows a real sensitive understanding of street needs," Whitwell said, pointing out that comparable roof levels of the garage and neighboring buildings will form "a line for the eye."
"It's important, near the market building, to respect its scale," said Connecticut architect Chad Floyd. He was project director for Design '79, a development plan for downtown Roanoke that was formulated more than a decade ago. Floyd said it will be important to continue to respect the market's scale as further development takes place around it.
Dominion Tower will be Roanoke's tallest building. That wasn't a specific objective, Dalhouse said, although the bank did want its "signature building" to be impressively high.
When Norfolk Southern decided not to be a tenant of Dominion Tower, thereby necessitating a smaller building, the parking floors were added to maintain a sufficiently lofty reach. Dalhouse said the idea was that of Henry Faison, the Charlotte-based developer who is building the tower.
The building's pedestrian entrance will be raised to keep it out of the downtown flood plain. On the Salem Avenue side, there will be a street-level sidewalk with trees, an elevated planting strip and then an upper sidewalk.
"There will be a real sense of plaza," said Timm Jamieson of Hayes Seay Mattern & Mattern Inc., the Roanoke architecture and engineering firm that is responsible for landscaping and other exterior work at the ground level.
On the Jefferson Street side, Jamieson said, plantings developed around one or more "majestic" trees will create the effect of a grove.
"Drivers heading north on Jefferson will have the impression they're entering a park," he said.
Street-level plantings at the tower should dovetail with proposed landscaping along Norfolk Avenue as part of proposed improvements at the Virginia Museum of Transportation. Taken together, the plantings would make an L-shaped green belt extending all the way from Elmwood Park to the museum, with an interruption only at the City Market.
Early plans called for the west side of the tower to intrude some 15 feet into Jefferson Street, but city officials objected. They wanted to preserve both the view along Jefferson and the integrity of the downtown street grid.
The atrium and walkway are not part of the present project. They are keyed to the future remodeling of Hotel Roanoke and the construction of the convention center, projects for which the timetable is indefinite.
However, planning for the atrium and walkway are in progress at Hayes Seay Mattern & Mattern. They are taken seriously, Jamieson said, because of their importance as a link between the north and south sides of the railroad tracks.
"Other than Center in the Square, it's probably the most important project we've ever done downtown," he said.
Although not specifically intended for the purpose, the atrium at Center in the Square has proven popular for receptions, parties and similar events. Jamieson said he would like the new atrium to be similarly usable in addition to functioning as access to the pedestrian walkway.
"It's not all related to dollars," he said of the design. "It's related to community."
There will be a number of commercial enterprises on the ground level of the parking garage and close to the atrium. In the future, when the convention center is in place and the hotel is back in operation and the walkway is up, Jamieson foresees a new area of downtown nightlife in the vicinity of the atrium and the market.
Wishneff said the two office buildings will generate hundreds of thousands of dollars in tax revenue for the city and are likely to spur additional economic development as they bring hundreds of new people into the downtown area to work, shop and eat.
Dalhouse agrees.
"No downtown area is successful unless it has a lot of people," he said. "We fought like tigers to get that site for the very purpose of enhancing real estate values and anchoring a lot of people. We believe it has community value and economic value far beyond the intrinsic value of just this building.
"And let me add that this is not entirely altruistic on the part of Dominion. When anything enhances the economic vitality of downtown, we get a major share of the benefits."
Memo: correction