Curtis High School

The complexity of the Curtis High School restoration alone warranted recognition, according to the jury.

A century's worth of aging took its wear and tear on the Staten Island school, which needed a $25.5 million restoration and rehabilitation of the six buildings that make up the campus.

Five of the six buildings were designed in the Collegiate Gothic style, a style that was to be kept while upgrading the deteriorating structural and aging roof systems. To do so, the project team replaced and rehabilitated the terra-cotta, brick and limestone facades and other typical gothic structures such as gargoyles and shields.

All was not simple, however. Each of the school's six buildings varied in design, materials and structural systems, and, as an official city landmark designated by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, every repaired and replaced element had to replicate the original design exactly.

The 55,000-sq.-ft. main building was the original structure of Curtis High School and was built in 1902. In that building, workers had to repair a 120-ft. tall turreted tower composed of four crenellated parapet walls connecting four corner turrets and featuring gothic figurines, flames, finials, scallops, floral patterns and string courses.

The tower was found to be structurally unsound, so the project team designed a new structural system to support the top 20 ft. of the tower, which was reconstructed. It also performed structural repairs on the lower parts of the tower - by pinning the exterior walls and altering the bearing of intermediate stiffening beams - and to the windows and the original roof. Finally, the majority of the terra-cotta façade was replaced.

Repairs to a three-story projecting window bay provided the major challenge for the classroom building, constructed in 1921. The projecting bay was clad in terra cotta, which because of a flaw in the original structural design, was forced to bear the load of the window. The team redesigned the structural system, gutting down the section to structural concrete floor slabs and inserting a galvanized structural tube system.

Other aesthetic restorations to the classroom building include replacement of the deteriorating face brick and parapet walls and roof repairs.

Rehabilitation to the auditorium/library building, built in 1926, required replacing the entire top 40 ft. of the four copper-domed corner turrets. Similar to the classroom building's projecting bay, each of the turret's supporting walls was structurally redesigned to allow the terra cotta to be hung as veneer rather than be load-bearing.

The gymnasium building, built in 1935, features limestone parapet walls that had extensive cracking in the limestone and brick buttresses. Workers pinned the brick and limestone-clad steel buttress piers to the base building to remedy the problem and also replaced the roofs and removed and replaced deteriorating parapet walls and brick façade.

Also built in 1935, the natatorium required a new roof. Its existing roof, which was built in 1990, was deteriorating because it did not properly ventilate the moisture from the swimming pool, so the team designed an insulated copper-batten roof that resembled the building's original and kept the feel of the Collegiate Gothic style.

The youngest of the six buildings, the cafeteria building, built in 1964, required only repairs to existing brick exterior walls, copper and roofing.