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Tuesday, September 2, 2008
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Building for future at Ah-Gwah-Ching
Cass County Correspondent WALKER - The Ah-Gwah-Ching main buildings were built to last 100 years and some built the first half of the last century have accomplished that.
The state celebrated Ah-Gwah-Ching's centennial before closing state operations there and selling the site earlier this year to Cass County.
Many people have been asking: "Why isn't Cass County going to remodel and reuse the existing buildings instead of tear them down?"
County Administrator Robert Yochum answered that question in an interview Thursday.
The state at least three times went through a process to offer the property to private bidders, but business owners did not want it, Yochum said. The state then offered the property to Cass County.
Minnesota Department of Corrections looked at the property a few years ago when the county asked whether it could be converted to a juvenile detention center or a jail. DOC said, "No."
The state and federal governments turned down using it for a veterans home, Yochum said.
The buildings are mostly brick faced cement block with terrazzo floors and sound structurally. In fact, hazardous waste removal contractor Tim Huber of Industrial Hygiene Services said his crews have had a hard time chipping apart some of the interior to get at the asbestos they needed to remove.
The problem is in the design, Yochum said. It is a series of long, narrow dormitories built in an era before modern designs evolved to address energy-efficiency or electronics or today's building uses.
Ah-Gwah-Ching means "open to the air" in Ojibwe, Yochum said. The buildings were built as one long hallway with a long series of individual tuberculosis patient rooms on either side. Each has a window to the outside and doorway to the hall.
The concept was to let cross ventilation carry the healing fresh north air across the hall between patient rooms. Some interior walls are structural walls, meaning they cannot be moved.
Today, efficient buildings are built more as a large square box, Yochum explained, without as many interior structural supports. This gives buildings flexibility to allow moving interior walls inexpensively as uses change. It allows for large open office rooms for multiple employees instead of small individual offices.
Larger open spaces can house more employees in less space. They can be heated and cooled more efficiently, he said.
The Ah-Gwah-Ching design does not work for a modern hospital or jail, because both today are designed with a central nursing station or guard post and patient rooms or jail cells around that central control area. That does not work in a long narrow design.
Offices today need a central point with a public waiting area. People coming to get a building permit do not want to be told to walk a block down the hallway to find office Number 45 on the left, Yochum noted.
Today's offices filled with electronic equipment would suffer from dust that blows in with the fresh north air if all office windows were kept open, Yochum noted. Today's offices have filtered, even temperature heating and cooling systems, so electronic equipment does not fail.
Building materials are designed to be more dust free, he said, and to make heating and cooling systems operate efficiently.
When buildings were built before 1950, as much of Ah-Gwah-Ching was, there was not a need to allow space between floors to carry air exchange, heating and cooling ducts or today's mass of telephone, Internet and electrical cables, Yochum said.
Ironically, it is the fact that these buildings were so sturdily built that makes them very difficult and prohibitively expensive to try to convert the interior to fit to today's commercial or governmental uses, Yochum said.
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