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‘Black and White and Redone all Over’: HASTINGS featured in The New York Times

Black and White and Redone all Over

By Ted Loos for The New York Times

In Nashville, a surging economy has led to a recent construction boom, with cranes dotting the skyline. And the city’s built environment has always been subject to such churn.

“We’ve never had that deep stock of old buildings that other cities enjoy,” said David Bailey, a partner in Hastings Architecture, one of the city’s best-known firms.

But Mr. Bailey and his colleagues have done their part to retain some of Nashville’s history, in an adaptive reuse project that makes preservation seem forward-thinking indeed.

Hastings took a 1966 modernist structure that was once the Nashville Public Library’s main branch and turned it into a striking headquarters for its firm of 75 employees, which specializes in commercial and institutional architecture. The project was finished in June.

The two-story building, designed by the architect Bruce Crabtree, is clad in white Cherokee marble and defined by long colonnades of arched windows, evoking other landmarks of its era, like Lincoln Center in New York and the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles. Its downtown site is central, close to the Tennessee State Capitol.

When Hastings bought the structure in 2017, it had sat empty since 2001, when the library moved two blocks away to a structure designed by Robert A.M. Stern.

“This whole project was in keeping with who we are as a business,” said Dave Powell, another partner in the firm. “It’s all about community.”

He added, “This building was meaningful to anyone in the city because of its history and its place in the urban fabric.”

Read the full story here.

Image credit: Kyle Dean Reinford for The New York Times

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