American Tobacco Historic District

By Marc Barnes, The King's English. Editor: Ashley Harbaugh, LC/dbm

The American Tobacco campus offers more than period charm; it's also practical. The clay pavers used for the project are rated to handle service and emergency vehicle traffic as needed. Most of the courtyard can be accessed by emergency vehicles. Photo Courtesy of Bob Hughes Photography

Water, concrete, green space and historically appropriate clay pavers come together in an innovative landscape for a commercial venture that sets a new standard for historic preservation - and provides a challenge for designers and installers alike.

Sometimes, the effort is well worthwhile. The American Tobacco Historic District in downtown Durham, North Carolina is one example of past, present and future that has found common ground. A rambling campus of red-brick tobacco warehouses and processing plants constructed between 1870 and 1920 has been transformed into more than a million square feet of mixed-use space of restaurants, residences and class A offices.

Activating the Campus

The former home of American Tobacco takes up about two city blocks. On the two street-facing sides it's a monolithic edifice of brick and glass. Inside, landscape architect Jean Aldy and her design team have created an expansive and serene courtyard with two key features: an amazing waterscape named ''Bull River'' and an inviting hardscape that ties together decades of industrial construction history with distressed brick and concrete.

The owners insisted on restoration wherever possible, which is in marked contrast to the too-common practice of knocking it all down, putting up an ersatz copy, selling it and moving on to the next project.

The project's success depended on communication among workers on the site and vigilance. ''We were monitoring production rates every week and we are trying to make sure that the billing and time matches up,'' says Adams. ''If you have spent 60 percent of your hours but the job is only 40 percent complete, then there is an imbalance. And the longer you are there, the more likely you are to do things without getting paid for it. You must manage the time you spend on the job.'' Photos Courtesy of Smallwood, Reynolds, Stewart, Stewart & Associates, Inc.

Choosing the Right Pavers

The American Tobacco Historic District hardscape required about 40,000 square feet of pavers. Pine Hall Brick was the choice of Fred Adams, president of Fred Adams Paving Co., for both performance and aesthetic reasons.

''The Rumbled pavers are consistent in material and strength. They're made to the same standards of regular pavers, but still look old,'' says Adams.

The pavers make up most of the walkways, but interact with concrete that also has an historic tie to the industrial past. Even reclaimed broken concrete chunks are used to create a walkable riverbed that merges with the paved path.

Adams says that the job was particularly challenging, because of the elevations and timing. In some places, workers could drive directly to the site; in others, material had to be handed over a guardrail. During some of the construction, businesses in the complex were up and running, which meant that some of the work had to be done at odd hours. And during some, the weatherman hadn't gotten the memo about when the job was supposed to be completed and ordered up snow and sleet when it wasn't particularly wanted.

Adams says today that the key to success was communication among all of the workers on site. Careful planning ahead of time, ongoing progress meetings and vigilant project management ensured a successful outcome.

Although all the buildings are more or less red brick, there are subtle differences due to each building's construction with the available materials of its time. The Rumbled pavers provided the aged affect and the perfect blend of color that visually merged with the 150-year-old buildings, as well as the newer factories.

Bull River

The centerpiece of the project - and the most daunting in terms of both design and construction - was the construction of a river where one hadn't existed before.

The idea was to keep the water in the river at a constant level and doing that required constructing an underground reservoir. Aldy said that meant digging out the area to determine, in part, what was there and determine whether or not it would work or alternatively, what it would take to make it work. As it turned out, a lot of what was behind the walls, walks and stairways was intact and able to be re-used to support the new manmade river.

Although the project presented many different challenges for the team-such as material transportation and bad weather-the team pulled together. ''If you have a lemon, you have to make lemonade and everybody involved was there to make lemonade,'' says Fred Adams, president of Fred Adams Paving Co. Photos Courtesy of Smallwood, Reynolds, Stewart, Stewart & Associates, Inc.

New Life in Old Buildings

As tenants continue to arrive, you get a sense of a town within a town when you wander up and down the expansive courtyard. It's a perfect example of the new urbanism trend in America.