Project Name: Cooper Hall, Sterling College
Project
Location: Sterling, Kansas
Completion Date: March 2003
Size: 19,700 sq ft
Award: 2004 KPA Award for Excellence
Project Description:
This project involved the historic preservation of Cooper Hall,
the original classroom building on the campus of Sterling College.
Cooper Hall, built in 1876, was closed in 1985. Prior to being closed,
Cooper Hall was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The
years during the closure were not kind to the building, and it sustained
severe deterioration. The exterior walls started to buckle and the third
floor collapsed into the floors below. Initially, Sterling College undertook
the historic preservation of Cooper Hall utilizing only a grant from the
Kansas State Historic Society. However, after the collapse of the third
floor and other cost overruns, Sterling College contracted with the Pioneer
Group to secure state and federal historic preservation tax credits in order
to gain the additional funding that had become necessary. One of the first
problems encountered was that the federal historic preservation tax credits
are only available to profit-oriented owners and, 
in the case of Cooper Hall,
it was owned by Sterling College, a not-for-profit educational organization.
We worked with one of the nation's leading tax credit law firms, Nixon Peabody, of
Washington, D.C., to create a for-profit corporation that became the "owner"
of Cooper Hall and to create an economic use for the building
under the guidance of the new owner. We believe this approach is one of the first of
its kind in the country. The second major problem was that the renovation
work started prior to the filing of the renovation plan with the National
Park Service. The plan was not approved as submitted which required a series
of negotiations with the National Park Service in order to minimize the
expense of removing work that had already been completed.