When WinnCompanies CEO Gilbert Winn decided to buy the historic Sibley Building in Rochester, N.Y., in November 2012, he had an ambitious vision of transforming the massive building into a thriving mixed-use, mixed-in- come development that would anchor an emerging economic revival for the city’s struggling downtown.
The obstacles standing in the way of that vision were formidable. One portion of the 1.1-million-square-foot structure was 107-years old. Another segment was 86-years old. The building was 80 percent empty. Its systems, the interior and the facade were run down and deteriorating. Many of its interior spaces had been haphazardly subdivided over the decades. Key historic ornamental features were hidden under ad-hoc renovations. There were eight separate entrances, 22 elevators and two sky bridges connected to adjacent parking structures.
The development team’s first priority was understanding, in detail, what we were going to own, so that we could map out the various components of the project we would be developing over the coming decade. Trustworthy, precise knowledge of the building allowed us to plan three residential communities, a retail component and even high-tech incubator offices. The conditions of each part of the building were different and varied, so this front-end existing conditions survey was fundamental to our path forward and planning.
For WinnDevelopment, the company’s development arm, the $200 million project—which has since been rebranded as Sibley Square—represented the largest, most complex mixed-use effort in the company’s 50-year history. To attract the public and private investment, the company needed to stabilize and retrofit the asset. There was no room for error.
The company relied on two key Boston-based partners to establish sound plans for the retrofit: The Architectural Team (TAT), an award-winning architectural firm that specializes in historic adaptive-reuse design, and Existing Conditions, a national leader in using 21st century reality- capture technologies to deliver the most comprehensive building documentation. Realistically, a mixed-use repositioning, urban revitalization project of this scale and complexity would have been impossible to get our hands around without the expertise of TAT, which had partnered with WinnDevelopment on dozens of historic adaptive-reuse projects, and the laser scanning expertise of Existing Conditions.
Scan Work
The first portion of the Sibley Building opened in 1906 as a 391,444-square-foot department store designed by architect J. Foster Warner. The 6-story steel structure boasted 5 acres of floor space and was sheathed in brown Roman brick with expansive, deeply set Chicago-style windows. The design featured Baroque and Renaissance-style details, along with a copper-topped clock tower that quickly became a landmark for the bustling city’s skyline. In 1911, an addition known as the Mercantile Building added six more acres of floor place. In 1924, six floors were added to the top of the Mercantile Building, creating Sibley Tower, the city’s largest office building.
By the 1940s, the Sibley Department Store offered more than 1 million square feet of floorspace as the undisputed economic anchor of downtown Rochester, employing 2,400 people, serving as a favored shopping excursion for just about every family in the region and attracting visitors from throughout the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic. It closed in 1989, triggering a slow decline in terms of maintenance and capital improvements.
Our redevelopment needed to redesign the building from the inside out. We had to rediscover, preserve and accentuate its historic features in an innovative environment while creating spaces, systems and amenities that would appeal to a variety of new commercial and residential tenants. Essentially, we were reinventing the region’s most important building as a modern hub for housing, retail and innovation that would attract renewed energy to the downtown.
Our charge to TAT was to transform the building into Class A multifamily, commercial, restaurant and retail space over a phased period, incorporating a central atrium, multiple interior court- yards, multiple roof decks and mechanical spaces, along with 12 elevator cores. We wanted floorplans with multiple uses, taking into account access, light and air, existing and future mechanical systems/risers, and fire and life safety. The deep footprint of the mid-rise building with the atrium lightwell, for example, was perfectly suited to be converted to technology-focused office space, but its interior spaces needed a substantial retrofit for residential uses. The tower with an interior courtyard seemed perfectly suited for apartment layouts. The ground floor, stretching along both Clinton Avenue and East Main Street, is adjacent to the city’s transit center and ideal for retail.
Given the building’s development history, there was no way we were going to rely on the floorplans we inherited or traditional surveying techniques. We needed comprehensive 3-D images. We were not going to gamble on accuracy with so much at stake.
TAT turned to its longtime partner, Existing Conditions, whose building documentation services had consistently proven invaluable on complicated projects. The company’s ability to provide an accurate baseline set of measurements and assumptions is critical to identifying and documenting issues, allowing for optimal design solutions and minimizing construction risk.