ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, February 18, 1996 TAG: 9602160092
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: G-2 EDITION: METRO
THE STRONG case for establishing a higher-education center in downtown Roanoke is made all the stronger by the opportunity it affords for preserving the old Norfolk & Western office buildings, a part as much of Roanoke's character as of its history.
Those buildings, empty since NW successor Norfolk Southern moved its Roanoke offices in 1992 to a new structure a few blocks away, embody the city's rail heritage and are key ingredients of its physical appearance. Roanoke architect Paul Hayes called the north tower, where generations of Roanokers spent their working lives, "the best work I ever did."
If the General Assembly approves state Sen. John Edwards' proposed amendment to the 1996-98 Virginia budget, some $6.4 million would be spent to turn a part of that tower into the higher-education center. To leave the NW buildings instead to a wrecking ball would be to squander the valley's most important architectural inheritance.
Much of the project's appeal stems from its use of synergy - the principle that diverse forces acting in concert can achieve more than the sum of their parts.
Educationally, needed room would be made for expansion of the Roanoke Graduate Center, which offers master's-level courses from several area institutions, and of the new Radford University-Virginia Western Community College partnership, which is bringing publicly supported undergraduate programs to the Roanoke Valley. Through such cooperative endeavors, financial and other resources can be leveraged to get far more than if each institution acted alone or if the state were to start from scratch with a new college in Roanoke.
But the project's synergy doesn't stop with its educational components. Rather than destroy past achievements to make way for the future, as if past and future were foes, preservation uses the past to get a leg up on the future.
In part, this means getting a bigger bang for the construction buck. You might be able to build a sterile box for fewer dollars than renovating the same square footage, but what you'd get is ... a sterile box. A structure equivalent to the Roanoke River-sand and NW red-hued classics could not be built new for the same money, if it could be built at all. Moreover, labor typically constitutes a greater and materials a lesser portion of renovation than of new-construction costs - and so keeps more money in the local economy than would a new-construction project of similar size.
In this case, preservation also carries a flexibility otherwise unattainable. A brand new, big office tower is unlikely to be built anytime soon in Roanoke. But a series of $5- and $10-million projects is plausible - until ultimately, as market demand grows, mothballed portions of the old NW buildings could be phased back into service for workplaces or other purposes. A team of Virginia Tech architects has suggested that the south building, if mothballed for now, could be adapted later for downtown apartment living - a fantastic idea.
The structures' location boosts their synergetic potential. The buildings could be a bridge between the reopened Hotel Roanoke and new conference center to the east and the Henry Street area to the west, which the city would like to see redeveloped. The buildings' renewal would enhance the prospects of both the other projects. To the south lies the City Market and a proposed linear park along the NS tracks.
Preserving the buildings through adaptive reuse would help the Roanoke Valley maintain its own identifying character. That's important for specific projects, like the exhibition hall some have proposed for the block (and a good bet to flop if it replicates every other overbuilt concrete-block convention center in the country). It's also important for the more general task of discovering and developing our distinctive niche in a competitive world.
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