The National Building: History Beneath Our Feet
Once known as “Easton’s Skyscraper,” the Northampton Bank Building has been a visual anchor in downtown Easton since it was erected in1908.
Any design team that tackles adaptive reuse projects learns to expect the unexpected.
When a historic building has been vacant or underused for a long period of time, large-scale renovations can reveal a host of unanticipated issues, from lurking environmental hazards to unforeseen conflicts between building code requirements and historic preservation guidelines.
Thankfully, rehabilitation projects can also surprise us in ways that delight rather than discourage.
The recent adaptive reuse of Easton’s National Building, formerly the Northampton Bank Building, provides a case in point.
The renovation was designed to retrofit the building’s upper floors, which had been converted to office space in a prior renovation, into 32 apartments, while preserving the building’s grand lobby and other historic elements throughout.
The project team, which included Artefact as architect and historic preservation consultant, had expected to be awed by the restored grand lobby, especially the freshly painted Renaissance Revival-style vaulted ceiling:
We did not, however, expect to find another astonishing design feature hiding right under our feet throughout the entire project—literally lurking beneath the lobby carpet.
When the crew began pulling up the old carpet to replace it, they were shocked to find an original mosaic tile floor in near perfect condition!
As the crew carefully polished away the remaining carpet and adhesive, the early twentieth-century tile design began to take shape: the original Northampton Bank logo surrounded by a Greek key-pattern border.
By their very nature, adaptive reuse projects require a careful balance of modernization and historic preservation. In the case of the National Building, the process of modernizing portions of an early twentieth-century bank building for residential use unexpectedly revealed one of the building’s most remarkable historic features.
Click through the gallery to see the original floor in all its glory!
