Content area
Full text
A restored 19th-century Kansas City office block benefits from energy-conserving strategies and ecologically friendly materials.
"Preservation and environmentally sensitive design complement each other very well," maintains Kirk Gastinger, principal of Gastinger Walker Harden Architects in Kansas City.The firm's recent $30 million renovation of a McKim, Mead & White-designed office building in downtown Kansas City, Missouri, proves Gastinger's point. While upgrading the 1888 landmark, the architect added the latest energyconserving systems and environmentally friendly materials to create a new headquarters for a local utility company, UtiliCorp United.The company wisely decided to move into the derelict former headquarters of the NewYork Life Insurance Company to meet its needs for increased office space instead of looking to a generic downtown high-rise or a suburban office park. UtiliCorp hired local developer Zimmer Companies and Gastinger Walker Harden to transform the building into a working demonstration of its commitment to energy conservation.
Local landmark
The 1888 Neo-Romanesque masonry structure is one of two Midwestern regional office buildings designed by McKim, Mead &White for NewYork Life Insurance in the 1880s. (The other is located in Omaha.)The Kansas City building is not the turn-of-the-century architect's most famous, nor its best. But it is a popular local landmark and the source of several architectural firsts for Kansas City: the city's first steelframed structure, its first skyscraper, and its first building with elevators.
The insurance company building was occupied continuously for nearly a century, until 1986, when a local developer began converting the building into corporate apartments.
In 1988, midway through the renovation, the project went bust, and the partially refurbished building remained vacant for more than six years. By the time Gastinger began the latest rehab, the structure was in miserable shape.
The massive, 200,000-square-foot masonry building is H-shaped in plan: A pair of 10-story wings frame a central 13-story tower crowned by a clay-tiled roof. At the north end of the building, Gastinger inserted a steelframed addition connecting the pair of 10-story wings to create a new interior courtyard.This addition provides much-needed lateral stiffening to the overall structure, given Kansas City's proximity to the New Madrid fault in southeastern Missouri. New steel plates in the existing masonry walls anchor the steel frame of the new wing to the original building; steel...