Photos by Stephanie Klein-Davis | The Roanoke Times
The 160-year-old landmark Roanoke College Administration Building is undergoing an exterior wall renovation (extreme left) after it was bowing outward under its own weight. The original bricks have been removed and a new brick veneer wall, this time complete with a foundation, is being put up.
The original bricks, made on-site, were removed from the Roanoke College Administration Building after an exterior wall began to bow and are stacked on pallets off campus. Some are crumbly after moisture affected their stability. Their replacements were matched by Old Virginia Brick in Salem.
The original bricks, made on-site, were removed from the Roanoke College Administration Building after an exterior wall began to bow and are stacked on pallets off campus. Some are crumbly after moisture affected their stability. Their replacements were matched by Old Virginia Brick in Salem.
If you own an older home, you'll understand this.
You don't really know exactly what you've got until it falls apart. And make no mistake: Things fall apart. That's what you put up with in an older home.
So it is with the home that Roanoke College has occupied since the mid-19th century.
Since August, workers have removed the entire west wall of the college's administration building, a National Historic Landmark, because it was bulging outward. They are now rebuilding it.
The painstaking process has offered a window into antebellum construction methods, some of which don't necessarily make you feel all that good about that construction.
"With a building of this age, you're always going to have maintenance issues," said Randy Jones, an architect and CEO of OWPR Inc., a Blacksburg architecture and engineering firm that has been involved in numerous building and renovation projects on the campus in recent years.
But this is serious maintenance.
For years, the wall has tried to bulge outward. In the 1980s, the college anchored the wall to the interior of the structure with steel rods, which helped, but still it bulged ever so slowly until something had to be done. It had pushed outward some three or four inches.
"It was getting close to the point of being critical," Jones said.
The wall, part of an addition to the original core of the building, had to be taken down, by hand, one brick at a time.
That was partly because they couldn't just knock it down without likely damaging very nearby Miller Hall. It's also because of the way the wall was constructed.
It was nothing but bricks ? no frame or other reinforcement ? stacked upon dirt. That's right, no foundation whatsoever.
The wall was five courses of brick thick at the base, Jones said, and graduated as the wall climbed higher.
Even taking it down by hand was tedious.
"You just don't know, as you systematically remove it, if it's going to stay," Jones said.
A giant wooden facia was removed in one piece and will be replaced.
The college also saved as many of the bricks as possible ? several thousand of them are stacked on pallets now ? but they aren't being used to rebuild the wall. College officials aren't yet sure what they'll do with them.
New bricks from Old Virginia Brick in Salem are being used in the reconstruction ? anchored to a modern, steel-reinforced concrete block wall and sitting upon a new concrete foundation.
Two windows from the wall, part of the original construction, were also saved and will be reused.
"It's the essential building on campus, so you want to keep it as original as possible," Jones said.
Taken as a whole, the building, with its several additions, is one of the 10 or 12 oldest buildings in Salem, said historian John Long, director of the Salem Museum.
The two-story center of the building was built in 1848. An east wing was added in 1852, and the west wing in 1854. In 1903, a third story was added to the building to give it the shape it has today.
It has had other problems through the years. One of the four massive columns on the front was replaced a few years ago. The rear of the west wing began to sag badly, so workers installed jacks to prop it up, though some windows still list to the right.
A chimney also had to be rebuilt.
But then, that's the stuff you put up with when you have an older home.
Source: http://www.roanoke.com/news/roanoke/wb/302771
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