Today’s thriving Tulsa Arts District was once a commercial and industrial hot spot north of downtown Tulsa, Okla. The district’s origins in the late 1800s arose from the storage and export needs of the intersecting St. Louis-San Francisco Railway and Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railway. During the early 1900s, Tulsa’s need for warehouses only grew as the oil industry boomed. The warehouses that exist today were mostly built in the 1920s and served as the heart of Tulsa’s distribution system.
As the days of railroad dominance waned, the trucking industry began to pick up steam. The Archer warehouse, which had been built in 1925 along Archer Street for wholesale distribution, transformed into a trucking distribution center in the wake of the oil tenant exodus. After nearly 70 years of hustle and bustle, the industrial district grew quiet, and the warehouses slowly shuttered. The Archer building’s use changed over the years, eventually becoming a long-term storage facility in the mid-’90s.
Nearly 100 years after the district’s boom, the George Kaiser Family Foundation (GKFF) stepped in to revitalize the forgotten buildings in 2016. (Read about GKFF’s transformation of the district’s Universal Ford Building into 36 Degrees North, which appeared in retrofit’s July-August 2016 issue.) The 72,000-square-foot Archer warehouse building (which technically is four different structures), located in the heart of the district, was poised to re-stitch the fragmented urban fabric of the city.
GKFF representatives envisioned the Archer building as a multi-use space for everything from apartments to art studios, retail stores and restaurants, even an underground jazz club. Most of the warehouse’s original openings were blocked, and the original brick, which was painted a light tan color, made the building appear almost featureless.
Underneath the bland façade, GKFF knew the Archer building was worth a second chance. Principal Architect Chris Lilly of local firm Lilly Architects believed in that mission. “It just makes sense to transform aging buildings and spaces into something new and exciting; people have an inherent appreciation for it,” Lilly says. “Beautiful, engaging and telling of a bygone era, these buildings are essential in preserving a place’s culture.”
The Archer building’s history is now on display for visitors and locals to enjoy a mix of art, retail, restaurants and other amenities in the thriving Tulsa Arts District.
Pieces of a Puzzle
GKFF invests in a culturally vibrant and economically robust Tulsa to ensure a thriving community that affords opportunities for all citizens to enjoy a high quality of life.
In that vein, GKFF representatives were interested in creating artist studios within the Archer building for the Tulsa Artist Fellowship program, which brings artists together to live, work and interact within the city of Tulsa.
In addition to the artist studios, GKFF representatives developed the Archer building to be supportive of a vibrant and activated street front. When the project began, the Archer building had been long-term storage for paper records primarily. There were signs of homeless people living in the vacant portions of the building but, overall, it was in good structural condition.
The building was a mix of framed partitions/lay-in ceilings and open warehouse space. It was difficult to get a sense of what the interior might be like because many of the original openings were covered. Therefore, the design team performed a 3D scan of the structure to maximize accuracy in the design documents.
One of the project’s significant challenges was coordinating the many entrances with the exterior grading of the sidewalks. Through the decades, the building was added to and modified many times. As a result, many floor elevations were inconsistent. The scan proved invaluable in finding inconsistencies during the design phase before bidding.
To take advantage of the Archer building’s 125- by 300-foot footprint, the design team located the building’s retail tenants along Archer Street, Detroit Avenue and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. This strategy activated those public-facing façades.
Meanwhile, on the alley side of the building, large-format artist studios were created for the Tulsa Artist Fellowship. The studios feature overhead doors for easy loading and unloading and are often utilized for exhibitions and shopping. The design was inspired partly by the Torpedo Factory Art Center located in Old Town Alexandria, Va. More artist studios are located on the second floor of the Archer building, along with 14 apartments, ranging in size from 540 to 760 square feet. Special attention was given to acoustics; noise-controlling ceiling products were used to provide isolation in conjunction with multiple layers of drywall.
The rooftop terrace was a challenge the design team solved. The structure required reinforcement to accommodate the loading of the terrace. Sightlines also were important in maintaining the original massing of the historic building. Today, the rooftop terrace is a daily amenity for the artists, as well as accommodates outdoor exhibits and entertainment, such as the First Friday Art Crawl, a monthly event that draws visitors from far and wide.