APRIL 2008» recent projects

Texas Turreting

By Eve M. Kahn

The prognosis seemed dire 30 years ago when the Dallas-based restoration architect James Pratt first toured the city's 1892 county courthouse. "It had been eviscerated of all wood and marble and most stained glass," he says. "It had lost the top third of its clock tower and its entire central stair. The walls and archways were covered with sheetrock and fake Formica. The gutters had been ripped out, so water was flowing down the sides of the building and pooling in the attic, and the tension members in the roof trusses had been cut so you could see rivets popping out and the trusses digging holes into the masonry. Not to mention," he adds, "there was an inch of acidic bird guano on the masonry, eating away at the mortar."

Pratt immediately started stabilizing endangered areas and prioritizing and executing repairs. He has only slowed down during the past year, since the overhauled courthouse has opened as a county history museum plus a convention bureau, ballroom-sized events hall and courtroom for visiting judges. The building's $23 million restoration has made the courthouse corridors ring with a unique mixture of gavels, wedding DJs and schoolchildren's excited chatter.

"At first I'd thought it was a second-class building, in terms of architectural and construction quality, because it was so damaged," says Pratt. "But we've kept discovering more and more evidence of its original grandeur. It's revealed itself as richer and richer."

The original architect, a Brooklyn-born German-American named Max A. Orlopp Jr., had specified a Texas red granite base and trim for a multi-turreted mass of Peco red sandstone. ("Old Red" has long been the building's nickname.) Before Orlopp completed his Richardsonian Romanesque essay at the site, five previous courthouses had stood there. Made of logs, brick or granite, each one had burned down. So Orlopp aimed for maximum fireproofing.

"The floors are a system of tile arches between light steel members set five feet apart, with tension rods in between," says Pratt. Orlopp also fitted the structure with his era's latest mechanicals, including steam heat and hydraulic elevators. Landmark legal cases, such as temperance battles against gambling houses and struggles for civil rights, were heard in courtrooms with 20-ft. ceilings, gilded moldings and kaolin porcelain fireplace boxes.

The building held up well even as county administrators lopped off some ornament in the early 1900s. The tower was deemed structurally unsound and shortened, its 4,500-lb. bell and 10-ft.-wide clock were sold for scrap for $300, and offices took the place of the atrium's curlicued iron stair.

In the 1960s, courtrooms were chopped into yet more offices, causing grievous structural problems. Contractors slathered silicone compound onto the masonry: "Of course water migrated behind and froze, and the compound started popping off," says Pratt. In an enclosed north porch, a leaky planter on the steps caused rising damp. Air-conditioning installers had cut into the steel frame, so widespread rust had formed on the structural members. Pratt's restoration contractor glumly suggested gutting the interior.

"That demolition would have cost a million dollars which, fortunately as it turns out, our budget wouldn't allow," says Pratt. "I asked for advice from a physicist I knew in Venice who was experimenting with lasers to clean statues. He convinced us to use high-intensity lamps to zap off the rust on the steel, which only cost $40,000."

The 30-year courthouse restoration, he adds, "has proceeded in six major phases and countless smaller phases." Working for the Old Red Foundation of Dallas, TX, he has rethought every inch of the building, from new subterranean drainage troughs to 14 tons of steel roof reinforcements. In his most significant recent intervention, he recreated the tower's top 90 feet, complete with an aluminum and steel lantern (from Campbellsville Industries in Campbellsville, KY), a bronze bell cast by Royal Eijsbouts of the Netherlands, and a clock from Boston's E. Howard & Co. (successor to the firm that made Orlopp's original).

Pratt based the tower's structural engineering on wind-tunnel tests of a courthouse mockup. "We interspersed our new tower with 4-in.-thick concrete diaphragms, and we added 40 I-beams into 16 pockets in the existing tower stub," he says. "We've been monitoring the lower walls for the past year, and they haven't moved even a tenth of an inch. The 3-ft.-deep original limestone footings, it turns out, are incredibly strong."

Datum Engineers of Dallas, TX, provided structural consulting and the contractor for the project is Thos. S. Byrne of Fort Worth, TX.

Pratt keeps stumbling upon more of Orlopp's inspired ideas, or their ghosts. When partitions were torn out of the stairwell, outlines appeared of original landings, banisters, treads and risers, which Robinson Iron of Alexander City, AL, has replicated. Pratt has turned up samples of the original tricolor roof slates (in the attic), and discovered that one county commissioner had taken home a souvenir chunk of Tennessee marble wainscoting, and another commissioner had stashed away one white-oak, stile-and-rail door with solid brass hardware.

While the interior has regained its 1892 stateliness, some modern touches suit the demands of artifact exhibits. The courtroom ceilings look like their plaster ancestors, but are covered in Eurospan, a sound-absorbent polyester, and the centers are subtly dropped to make room for air ducts. Pratt fashioned new but weathered-looking window frames out of wood salvaged from Alabama beer vats, and the 7/16th-in. laminated glass panes provide 96 percent UV blockage.

The exhibit designers, Gallagher & Associates, further protected artifacts from sunlight by covering windows with perforated vinyl scrims printed with vintage photos. The scrims, says Gallagher senior designer Greg Matty, "are back-lit at night, and they help brand the building as a museum." The galleries' panel displays and vitrines (fabricated by Explus Inc. of Houston, TX), Matty adds, rest on weighted steel bases rather than any support poles piercing the sensitive tile-arch floors.

Wiring is equally unobtrusive; a centrally controlled wireless system connects scores of touch-screens. The computer games and video footage explore the history of the county's two dozen municipalities. The quirky selection of objects ranges from a chunk of stone from the river crossing where Dallas was founded, to a gilded walk-in safe made for the county treasurer, the guns used in the arrest of Bonnie and Clyde, Lee Harvey Oswald's handcuffs, and a 15-ft.-long neon Pegasus that advertised a Dallas oil company.

The galleries occupy part of the ground floor and most of the second, while the top floor contains a courtroom with a pilastered judges' bench, plus an events hall that is already booked up for every Saturday night through the end of 2008. Pratt says he long expected Orlopp's revealed design to have huge popular appeal. "The slow pace of the restoration turned out to be fortuitous," he says. "Just last year, we discovered and exposed another forgotten arch that had been blocked up. There's been a 30-year series of finds and surprises." TB

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