The 16th edition of the North American Copper in Architecture (NACIA) awards honored several outstanding restoration projects, highlighting copper’s timeless aesthetic appeal and exceptional durability. The following examples from this year’s winners—plus a bonus project—all feature quality craftsmanship and illustrate excellence in renovation of historic roofs, cladding and architectural ornamentation.
Gould Memorial Library
Designed by McKim, Mead & White for New York University, Gould Memorial Library is widely considered Stanford White’s best building. Its material palette, detailing and striking rotunda dome enrich the library’s classical revival style and make it a centerpiece of Bronx Community College in Bronx, New York.
Completed in 1900, the building had suffered significant water infiltration through the roofs and upper walls after a century of service, damaging its interiors and weakening its structural integrity. Architects Beyer Blinder Belle, contractor Nicholson & Galloway, engineer Silman, and metal fabricator Heather + Little worked to restore the roof and preserve the building, arresting water ingress, improving the performance of roofing systems, and upgrading maintenance access while respecting the building’s original design.
The dome roof was a main focus of the team, who had to replace badly deteriorated shingles with custom-formed copper shingles designed to match the originals. They also addressed deficiencies in the original roof system design, improving watertightness and thermal stability of important flat roof areas with a new flat-seam-soldered copper system. Deteriorated elements of the dome’s drum cornice received a curved, custom-stamped copper cornice with a strengthened back-up wall. The team also repaired the copper-framed skylights with new covers, flashings and glazing.
Martin County Courthouse
Located in Fairmont, Minn., Martin County Courthouse was designed in a Beaux Arts style by architect Charles Bell. Built in 1907, this 3-story stone building features a 50-foot copper dome cap with four clocks, each 7 feet in height, along with four copper eagle statues that keep watch over the city and nearby Lake Sisseton.
After more than a century of service, the courthouse had suffered water damage in multiple locations. Local officials engaged contractor Renaissance Historic Exteriors and ISG as engineer to repair the courthouse’s many copper elements, including the dome and clock tower, eagle statues, finials and roof systems.
Before constructing the new standing-seam roof system, the team first had to address the crumbling cinder concrete substrate, to which the original copper roofing had been attached without furring or sheathing. Each set of roof panels on the dome had different radii and widths, requiring significant care to solder. Likewise, the underlying copper ribs varied from bottom to top, and each section required soldering on the back and front sides where the various elements met. The team decided to fabricate each section in a workshop offsite, allowing extra care in forming and joining the diverse elements.
Other copper elements demanded even more exacting craftsmanship. Replicating the four eagle statues required the team to join components created with 50 different molds, as did creating the custom copper facing for the large clocks.
Studio Building
The Studio Building in Portland, Ore., was built by the Ellison-White Conservatory in 1926. It originally housed nearly 130 rehearsal spaces for musicians and actors preparing to perform at the adjacent Taylor Street Theater. A decade after the theater closed in 2006, work began to convert both buildings into more than 30,000 square feet of retail and office space.
The building’s most recent renovation was led by Hennebery Eddy Architects and Harder Mechanical Contractors, who replaced the nearly 100-year-old copper roof with new 20-ounce copper panels that closely replicated the historical design. Several factors made installation more difficult, including the requirement to complete work while the building remained operational and the need to protect pedestrians passing below. The team also had to adjust for weather conditions, including designing and installing internal downspouts that could handle higher volumes of water; recent rainfall has become heavier than the original design could manage.
U.S. Naval Academy Chapel
Designed by Ernest Flagg and built in the early 1900s, the chapel at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., represents one of the country’s first domes built using reinforced concrete. The original terra-cotta roofing was replaced with copper in 1929 because of chronic leaks. After nearly a century, the academy decided to renovate the roof to provide additional decades of use.
A restoration team led by BELL Architects and architects Rogers, Lovelock & Fritz, along with contractors G-W Management Services and Prospect Waterproofing Company, took a comprehensive approach to the project, replacing all copper cladding on the dome and lantern, replacing flashing across the roofs, introducing through-wall flashing at the parapets along the perimeter of the dome and nave, replicating the gold-leafed ornamentation and installing custom copper-clad skylights.
At the dome’s base, the team started with larger copper sheets and flat panels and then progressed up the dome, utilizing 20,000 square feet of 20-ounce copper sheets. For the cupola floor that also serves as a cap for the crown, the team installed standard flat-locked and soldered copper panels.
Decorative elements on the cupola were fabricated by metalwork partner CopperCraft from mostly 2D panels and trapezoidal sections that were rolled for the curved sections and seamed at the corners and horizontal joints. The team used a specialty copper sheet to match the historic profiles on the building, along with brass alloy tubes and plates for the custom-fabricated guardrail.
Michigan Central Station
Finally, we include a very recently completed bonus project that was not part of the NACIA winners slate, but is exceptional nonetheless. Michigan Central Station opened in 1913 as a Beaux Arts gem of transportation architecture. A century later, however, the structure had become a derelict—picked at by vandals and devastated by decades of weather damage. Soon after Ford Motor Company acquired the building in 2018, Ford engaged Quinn Evans to determine how to preserve its historic character and add new functionality.
What Quinn Evans found was daunting. “One of the scariest moments was fairly early in the project … ,” recalls Architect Angela Wyrembelski. “We went up to the top of the Guastavino vaults, right below where the copper roof would have been and saw that, in the corners, these lower, depressed areas were completely full of ice. We thought, if there’s this much ice up here for this long, what are we going to find below? This building has been through so much. Are we going to be able to save it?” Overcoming those challenges required close collaboration between Quinn Evans and metalworkers from Custom Architectural Sheet Specialists (CASS).
Damage to the roof assembly was especially significant. When the project started, little of the original copper roof remained, meaning it would need to be rebuilt from scratch. The process started with architects recreating the historically accurate design. Copper was the best choice because of its authenticity to the period, adaptability to complicated roof conditions and formability. “We used archival drawings from 1912-13 to understand what the copper roof originally looked like,” Wyrembelski says. “We used those designs as the basis and cross-checked with some grainy old photographs to confirm how the roof was actually built.”
Once the designs were complete, CASS built mockups of several elements to “learn the little things,” recalls CASS Founder Glenn Parvin. The mockups allowed the team to review details without having to trek up onto the roof and helped them see how fast a protective patina would develop on the copper (much more quickly than the owners anticipated).
The new batten-seam roof represents “the most effective application of sloped roofing systems in copper,” notes CASS Project Manager Chad Miller. “A well-detailed and well-crafted copper roof has a life expectancy of 75 to 100 years and beyond.”
All these projects honor the tradition of exceptional architectural copper work across North America. To explore an extensive archive of other outstanding work across the spectrum of building types, access architectural drawings and test results, and get design assistance, visit the Copper Development Association website.
COVER PHOTO: Martin County Courthouse, courtesy ISG