Downtown Glacier: A new vision for an old building.

• Author: Rhode, Scott
• Position: ARCHITECTURE & ENGINEERING

The KeyBank Plaza in downtown Anchorage is no more. The magnitude 7.1 earthquake on November 30, 2018, killed it.

Oh, the nine-story building still stands at the corner of Fifth Avenue and F Street, but earthquake damage left it uninhabitable, so KeyBank has vacated as anchor tenant. Now the building is known by its address as 601 W. Fifth. Along with the new name, the building is getting a new look.

"The 601 building takes the precedent of the old structure and tries to retrofit it... inspired loosely by Alaska glaciers," says Derrick Chang, general manager of 6015th Avenue LLC. Based on that inspiration, the Seattle-based architecture firm Perkins&Will drew a design that strips the skin off the building, reinforces the skeleton, and puts a glazed covering on 33,000 square feet of new rentable space.

Slated for completion in summer 2022, the renovation resembles the shiny, oblique angles of 188 Northern Lights, also built and owned by Chang and his family through their development firm, Peach Investments. Whereas that ten-story office tower on top of a three-level parking garage cost about $40 million to build from scratch in 2008, the renovation of 601 W. Fifth has a price tag of at least $30 million, which pays for updated mechanical systems, floor-to-ceiling windows, and potential connections to the Egan Convention Center (more on that later).

However, Chang says unforeseen increases in the cost of freight, materials, and labor have driven the total closer to $35 million. In a way, tearing it all down might have been easier.

Just Like Starting Over

The tower was originally built for Alaska Mutual Savings Bank in 1972, more than a decade before the Egan Center across F Street and the Alaska Center for the Performing Arts across Fifth Avenue. Even without the 2018 quake, the building was due for an upgrade.

Brad Hinthorne, managing principal for Perkins&Will, describes the 70s vintage design as "precast concrete with strip windows, kind of a V shape, [and a] blank wall facing the parking lot." Not very attractive for new tenants.

"We are trying to make this into an iconic signature class-A office building." says Chang, "and I think the architecture, the shape, and also the orientation really speaks to that." As the owner, Chang had to decide how much of the old building to keep and how much to scrap.

Hinthorne explains, "They look at the pros and cons of their asset and they say, 'What if we left the skin the way it is and only did some repairs?' and 'What if we completely re-did it? If we re-did it, can we also add square footage? Or can we not?'... And also how does it compare to the cost of starting over, rebuilding new?"

The decision is based largely on the condition of the existing structure, but that analysis was complicated by a lack of detail. Mike Fierro, associate principal with Reid Middleton and the structural engineer of record on 601 W. Fifth, found only nine sheets of structural blueprints from the original construction, compared to forty-five sheets for the renovation. "When we're going back and renovating those old buildings," Fierro says, "it's always difficult to figure out 'Why did they do this?' or 'How would they do that?'"

The architect's job is to walk the client through the options. Hinthorne says, "If you added it all up and looked at the price tag of doing all of those things, it's less expensive than doing new and probably more valuable, at the end of...