Building around history
From a manor house to a Civil War turret, Virginia’s artifacts require creativity in construction

by Andrew Petkofsky
for Virginia Business
October 2007

In a chilling echo of the storm that sent the USS Monitor to the bottom of the Atlantic, water threatened to cause havoc again during construction of a museum wing to commemorate the famous Civil War ironclad. When an electrician’s lift slammed into a valve at the bottom of a huge tank preserving the Monitor’s recovered steam engine, thousands of gallons of water and chemicals spewed into the $30 million project. “We had a gusher,” recalls Dave Dwyer.

But careful design and construction of the USS Monitor Center at the Mariners’ Museum in Newport News turned potential disaster into mere inconvenience. A network of drains and sub floor trenches did their job when the mishap occurred in 2005: No liquid escaped into the exhibit galleries, says Dwyer, then a museum vice president and now an estimator for the project’s general contractor, W.M. Jordan Co.

Building around history is frequently a challenge in Virginia. The 63,500-square-foot center, which opened in March, is just one example of how the intersection of history and construction can challenge developers, general contractors and architects. In fact, it’s not unusual for the past to determine the future, at least to some degree.

That was certainly the case for the Monitor Center. It was literally built around the battleship’s massive 120-ton, 35-foot wide gun turret. A prized piece of history, the Monitor fought against the Confederate USS Virginia in the famed “battle of the ironclads” off the coast of Hampton Roads in 1862. One hundred and forty years later, divers recovered its turret from the bottom of the ocean off Cape Hatteras, N.C. It traveled via barge and was delivered to the Mariners’ Museum in August 2002 where the turret was placed in a tank and will undergo conservation for at least another decade. Because of the turret’s great size and weight, the new wing showcasing the Monitor’s 1,200 artifacts went up around it.

In the Old Dominion, history may be the central focus of a project — as it was with the Monitor Center — or it can crop up as a factor that must be considered in accordance with federal, state and local regulations.

Take the new clubhouse for the Belmont Country Club in Loudoun County. Building a modern structure was anything but routine for Dietze Construction Group of Ashburn, because the site included a historic 18th-century manor house. Built in the 1790s by Ludwell Lee, nephew of Richard Henry Lee — one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence — Belmont Manor is on the National Register of Historic Places. That meant consultations with the Virginia Department of Historic Resources before any changes could be made to the historic structure.

And history couldn’t be ignored when Historic Jamestowne opened a new museum this year to showcase archaeological artifacts in time for the 400th anniversary celebration of the country’s first permanent English settlement. The Archaerium was built on ground so full of history that its architect and general contractor took unorthodox measures to avoid disturbing historic building foundations, 400-year-old graves and other physical remainders of earlier centuries.

These history-linked projects spark creativity, extra expense and, sometimes, satisfaction as building officials find ways to balance the past and the present. The Belmont clubhouse posed unique challenges, says Jim Dougherty, a senior vice president at Dietze Construction.

To build it, Dietze first restored the federal-style manor house and then attached a new 45,000-square-foot structure to the older brick building. The addition has a modern, stucco exterior to complement the red brick exterior of the manor house.

To retain its historic character, Dietze replaced floors with period wood reclaimed from buildings from the 1700s and 1880s. Another concern was installing modern wiring and ventilation systems in a way that wouldn’t change the appearance of the manor house’s plaster interior walls.

Even so, Dougherty says, “It’s always more enjoyable to do a project like this than a standard office building.”

During the Archaerium project, Williamsburg architect Carlton Abbott and his partners faced the conundrum of building a modern museum directly over the remains of a Colonial statehouse. The building had to “float” over the archaeological site without damaging it. At first Abbott hoped that the museum’s floor windows would offer a view of archaeologists at work underneath it. But since the site was filled with ancient graves, Abbott abandoned the idea of active, public excavation as an attraction. Instead, he designed the windows to exhibit remains of the statehouse foundation.

To avoid disturbing the site with conventional concrete footings, the Archaerium’s general contractor, Richmond-based Daniel & Co. Inc., constructed the building on pilings drilled into the ground. Then it placed steel footings atop the pilings so the building’s foundation floats slightly above ground level.

Another challenge came in harnessing the constant temperature of ground water 20 feet below the surface. To tap into this resource, Abbott designed a geothermal cooling and heat system. Rather than dig trenches to lead pipes through the artifact-rich surface, Daniel bored three-inch-wide holes beneath grave sites and then downward to create about 20 wells for the air conditioning system.

Overall, the site was so filled with artifacts that archaeologists working at Jamestown were consulted every time the contractor so much as scraped the ground. “You can’t work on a site like this and know for sure [what’s there] until you start digging,” says L.J. Swain, Daniel & Co.’s executive vice president. “There were ruins that you could see, but then there were other things underground from skeletal remains to dishes to whatever.”

Federal law or local regulations frequently come into play when building sites have historically and archaeologically significant features. In other cases, developers take an interest on their own. “There’s a lot of understanding and appreciation of historic properties in the development community,” says Joanna Wilson, a project review archaeologist at the Virginia Department of Historic Resources.

Wilson’s department reviews 2,000 development proposals a year. Many are for projects governed by the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966. Others come to her attention because an increasing number of Virginia localities require developers to consider historically significant features of building sites. “I think it’s a reflection of how important the breadth of the history of our state is to its citizens,” she says.

Today, many archaeologists get the bulk of their income from performing surveys required by the regulations.

Developers, architects and general contractors, meanwhile, have become adept at altering project plans to protect historic sites. Sometimes developers can preserve history by incorporating exhibits or portions of old structures into new projects.

That’s what architect R. Anderson Moberg of Newport News had in mind for the Monitor Center. The project represented many challenges during construction, from the aesthetics of memorializing a ship with a landlocked building to engineering a safe space for the continuing conservation of the turret. A nationally prominent architect hired earlier had drawn a plan in which the building itself was a reproduction of the Monitor floating on a transparent base representing the water. But construction bids showed that plan would be far too expensive.

Moberg, who worked with contractor W.M. Jordan of Newport News as part of a design-build partnership, came up with a more practical plan. Apprentices at Northrop Grumman Newport News shipyard built a full-size reproduction of the Monitor, that was positioned outside the new museum’s wing, visible thorough a wall of windows. Moberg then drew plans that lined up the ship’s original turret and engine with their positions on the reproduction. Parts of the Monitor re-created for exhibits in the galleries also line up with their places on the reproduction. “All this was meant to be very open so that you could really embrace the artifacts and replica,” says Moberg.

Simply moving the heavy turret and its tank into position was itself a complex ballet. Because the tank was sitting flat on a concrete slab, there was no way to lift it from the bottom. The tank’s steel floor had been put in position first and the sides welded after the turret was placed on it.

So workers put a new steel tank floor on a new, permanent slab, cut the sides off the old tank and moved the turret onto the new bottom. Then they once again welded the sides to the tank floor with the turret in place. The process took more than two weeks, and the turret needed to be hosed down regularly to retard corrosion. “We had a couple of tense days there,” recalls Dwyer.

The special requirements of the artifacts and exhibits governed everything from the height of the conservation lab to the system of drains and trenches that averted disaster when a tank leaked. In the end, though, it was all worth it. As Dwyer notes, in the case of the USS Monitor: “There’s only one of these in the world.”