Progress at the Coos Bay Egyptian!

The Egyptian Theatre, in Coos Bay, is making great progress.  Earlier this week the marketing study, by Herb Stratford of Historic Theater Consultants/Mary Bosch of MarkeTek, was released to the public, identifying a sustainable mix of live performance and a range of films that can fill a niche in the Coos County/South Coast region.  This will enable the theatre to again serve its fans and rebuild back the audience that it lost in March 2011 when the doors were closed following the issuance of a structural report that result in a “dangerous building” designation.

Since then the City, which owns the building, and its partners the Egyptian Theatre Preservation Association, have been working hard behind the scenes to craft a new future for this gem of a structure.  In addition to Herb and myself, they have brought in new fund-raising talent in the form of Cascadia Consultants and most critically a soon-to-be finalized contract with an engineering firm that will revisit the structural issues.   A big problem with the first structural report was that it envisioned a fully-rehabilitated building capable of putting on large scale Broadway-style shows, multiple green rooms, all new systems and mechanical improvements, plus a full code upgrade.  That would all be nice, but much of it isn’t necessary or, in light of the marketing study, logical.  Instead the Egyptian is now looking to a phased rehabilitation and the first phase is simply to get the doors back open, put the public back inside this incredible auditorium, let them enjoy the "Mighty Wurlitzer" once again, and re-tool the unfortunate perception that the building is beyond repair.  As a recent article in the local paper reports, that shouldn’t be too expensive to accomplish and we are hoping to have those doors back open by mid-2013. (see the article at http://theworldlink.com/news/local/egyptian-could-open-in-a-year/article_563ddfe0-b667-11e1-b22a-001a4bcf887a.html) 

On other fronts, the City is studying the drainage problem that led to fears of the lobby flooding and the ugly sandbags on the street, a paint and patch façade upgrade that will give give the building a cleaner appearance and correct some damage.  Plus there is a REALLY nifty fund-raising concept floating around that will just have to check back to hear about!  The Egyptian is coming back… count on it.  Well Done Coos Bay!

Restoration-A Team Sport (Why Seismic Terror Threatens Buildings)

There is a discussion, on one of the professional historic preservation listservs, that asks the question “Is the Architect the most important person in a restoration?”  The answers, including my own, tend toward “that depends on the architect” with the general consensus being that a good architect is a valuable element of the team, but the wrong architect can ruin a historic building.  I’ve met both of those architects (My architect friends know that long ago I started to characterize architects as being either “trainable” or beyond redemption.  I don’t work with the latter more than once).

But it is another professional member of the team who can often be more critical to the success of a project, if only because they can either make or break it long before the rest of us even get to start thinking about it.  That would be the structural engineer, a position that has risen in importance in Oregon in direct proportion to the rise in concern over seismic activity and the so-called “Big One,” that we are now taught to call the Cascadia Event.

The general public (read building owners and, unfortunately, too many building officials) tend to get really nervous about the structural integrity of “old” structures that don’t meet current building codes.  (We won’t mention that the building you are sitting in right now, unless it was built last month, probably doesn’t meet current building code either).  Well-meaning people tend to think “non-code compliant” and “unsafe” are somehow synonyms.  They aren’t.

So, why am I writing this?  Well, engineer issues are always at the forefront of project planning and, since I have several projects in that phase, I’ve been dealing with engineers.  Good ones are creative, experienced, and flexible.  The opposite, not quite so much.  Whatever I think about architects beyond redemption, I think about the wrong engineers to an exponential degree.  They can kill a project, and they can do so entirely unnecessarily.  Other times (read school districts) public officials use seismic concerns (founded or not) as an excuse for what they really what to do (See the Medford School District and the demolition of both Jackson and Roosevelt elementary schools a few years ago).

The building community, particularly in this poor economy, has a tendency to beat the drum of public safety related to unreinforced masonry buildings.  I don’t think that this entirely self-serving, but I also don’t buy that it’s the crisis it is sometimes made out to be.  You can retrofit most any building fairly economically to help assure that people will get out in the event of an “event” and, of course, any time you work on a building you should take the opportunity to improve its structural capacity.  But the reality is that you can only rarely save the building without incredible, unsupportable, expense.  And that is pretty much a good thing because it is the rare building (historic or otherwise) that really can justify that expense or merits saving.  Historic buildings are cool, no doubt.  But perhaps investing millions into them just to cover your hindquarters from a lawsuit isn’t the best use of capital. 

I was just involved with the planning for a police station, a building you probably want to survive an event, right?  The current, old, wood-frame, building had 1 in 158 probability of collapse during an earthquake.  Moving that use into another, significantly newer and more expensive building, would yield a probably of 1 in 31,600.  Pretty good odds.  But 1 in 158 isn’t all that terrible a starting point. And what NO engineer will ever actually tell you is that there is no such thing as an earthquake proof building.  That city, for considerably less money, will upgrade its existing facility and increase its survival by more than a factor of ten.  Better odds.  An economic study of the cost per life saved from 500 government mandated programs found that seismic upgrade to existing buildings was the single least cost-effective use of dollars.  Not much comfort, of course, if you are injured by a falling building, but perhaps from a policy standpoint those millions and millions of dollars would be better spent improving the safety of our cars and roads.  There is little doubt that it would save more lives.

Given the chance, one of my first recommendations to any client is to be sure they have all the right professionals in place; the architect, the contractor, and the engineer as early in the process as is possible so that each of us can communicate to each other.  It doesn’t always work, but it sure tends to work better than not.