Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, February 23, 1995 TAG: 9502230080
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Here's a Roanoke architecture quiz: Name a local structure designed by an internationally renowned designer - thought by some to be his greatest work.
Clue: It's so special it helped draw two young assistant professors of architecture to Virginia Tech a few years ago.
Is it St. Andrew's Catholic Church? Hotel Roanoke?
No, but you're close.
Think shorter, squatter, newer, plainer.
Professors Scott Gartner and Bill Green say Roanoke's architectural claim to fame is Norfolk Southern's old passenger station, across Shenandoah Avenue from the hotel. The two want to help get the building back into some kind of public use.
"It was probably Raymond Loewy's finest work," says Bill Green.
Loewy, a French emigre to America, was a designer, not an architect, and he was the father of industrial design. He streamlined Pennsylvania Railroad locomotives, Greyhound buses, International Harvester tractors, Studebakers, the Lucky Strike pack, the Exxon, Shell and BP gasoline logos, and dozens of other elegant icons of mid-20th-century America.
Gartner and Green's students have been scouring flea markets for smaller examples of Loewy's work.
In 1949, he was invited by the Norfolk and Western Railway, Norfolk Southern's forerunner, to redesign its station. "They went out of their way to get the best person available," said an admiring Green.
He and Gartner did a slide show on the station Wednesday for the Kiwanis Club of Roanoke, a show the two have been doing lately to help Roanoke recognize one of its overlooked treasures.
Not that the station, built first in 1909, seems threatened. Though Norfolk Southern tore down the rear concourse in 1993 so adjacent track could accommodate high-stacked railroad cars, Gartner and Green say the railroad went to considerable expense and trouble to reinstall signature Loewy window grilling on the back of the building.
With the renovated Hotel Roanoke's reopening set for April, there's talk of the station's becoming a satellite of the downtown visitors' center, or hotel offices, or something else that would serve railway fans and other tourists. There's been talk that the railroad might sell or give the station to the city, or maybe some other interested party.
Gartner and Green swear they know of no definite plans, but they clearly sense that good news is coming. And if somebody wants the station, the professors want to help. They'd like to lend design support as well to any effort to turn two nearby - and abandoned - Norfolk Southern office buildings into historical adjuncts of the conference center being built next to the hotel. (They have ideas about those buildings, too, and claim renovations wouldn't have to break the bank.)
The station? It would be a relative snap to renovate, they insist. "With a clawhammer and a dumpster," says Green. The building needs a new heating system, but mostly it needs removal of the lowered ceilings and other features that turned the station into railroad offices in the '70s but now obscure its features.
Walking around the station's exterior Wednesday, they peered in windows and pointed out the marble around every window and door, the heavy sandstone portico out front and the modern metallic design farther into the building.
Loewy, a lover of trains, rebuilt the station so a passenger's quick walk through its halls became an aesthetic passage from the life of the street to the life of the rails. The whole design, Gartner says, drew the passenger toward the tracks.
Though people aren't accustomed to thinking of a 46-year-old design as classical, that's exactly what these professors say the station is. It's "grandeur in a modern setting," says Gartner.
by CNB