William Jennings Bryan House
Scope of Work
Feasibility study for relocating the house
Location
Lincoln, NE
History
Originally built as the home of William Jennings Bryan in 1902-1903, gifted to become Bryan Health.
Designed by Artemus A. Roberts
Completion
This project is currently underway.
The Challenge
Over time, the Fairview Campus (Bryan East Campus) has expanded to accommodate growing inpatient services, outpatient care, and the Bryan College of Health Sciences. As a result, the William Jennings Bryan House has become increasingly surrounded by hospital facilities, limiting both its visibility and the campus’s ability to expand critical healthcare operations.
Bryan Health’s long-term campus planning identified the need to improve adjacencies between medical services, education facilities, and essential support operations such as laboratories, pharmacy services, and utilities. The Bryan House’s existing location created challenges for future development while also remaining an important historic landmark that needed to be preserved. Due to this, Bryan Health reached out to Berggren Architects to provide a feasibility study on relocating this historic home.
The Strategy
With more than 40 years of historic preservation experience, frequently working directly with the State Historic Preservation Office (SHPO), Berggren Architects understood the magnitude of the responsibility surrounding the relocation of a National Historic Landmark (NHL). Relocating an NHL is simply not done except when outside forces threaten the structure’s very existence. An NHL on an eroding shoreline has a legitimate reason for relocation. We recognized that we needed to document the factors forcing the relocation of Mr. Bryan’s home, and the means and methods to accomplish the move.
For this, we assembled a very specialized team of consultants. To ensure compliance with published standards for dealing with historic structures, we recruited Melissa Gengler of the Historic Resources Group. Inc. (HRG). She has experience with other NHL related projects which made her uniquely qualified to navigate the rules, regulations, and recommendations of SHPO, the National Park Service (NPS), and the City of Lincoln’s Historic Preservation Commission (LHPC). Because the original site has been compromised and a new site has not yet been officially selected, having the best historic landscape architect for our team was essential. Melissa recommended a colleague, Liz Sargent with whom she had worked on numerous NHL projects. Liz’s firm is located in Charlottesville, Virgina. Her historic landscape projects are primarily scattered throughout the Atlantic seaboard state but also include several along the upper Mississippi river and as far west as Utah. She brings the kind of expertise this project requires.
To support the landscape architect’s design requirements, the Lincoln office of Olsson has joined our team to provide all the necessary civil engineer necessary to determine the feasibility of this potential relocation.
Notes:
We know there will be issues surrounding the support of Mr. Bryan’s home when it arrives at a new location. There will be concerns for the disconnection and reconnection of all the utilities currently serving the structure. Other issues faced with restoration, or replacement of deteriorated utilities as obstacles to a feasible relocation may arise.
The engineers of R. O. Youker, Engineering Technology Inc (ETI), as well as structural engineers and mechanical, electrical, & fire suppression engineers have joined our team to provide this expertise. R. O. Youker and ETI, have been the most reliable consulting engineers for Berggren Architects preservation projects for more than forty years. We know their skills, their integrity, and their experience is second to none.
From our experience with other relocation projects there is always some level of disassembly necessary to prepare a structure for lifting. In the case of an NHL all of those disassembled pieces are historic artifacts and will need to be available for reinstallation if Mr. Bryan’s home is to be relocated. Master woodworker and wood preservation expert Mr. Randal Weber was recruited to help determine the risks associated with any necessary disassembly, as well as the financial impact to the project for the careful disassembly, cataloging, packaging for storage, and the final reinstallation.
Our strategy from the onset has been to assemble the most knowledgeable and experienced team of professionals to study all aspects of a potential relocation of this one of kind National Historic Landmark.
The team respects the knowledge available from resources such as the National Park Service, the State Historic Preservation Office and the Lincoln Historic Preservation Commission. We are seeking their input and advice as we take on this very special challenge.
The Results
This project is currently underway. See the latest information in the “news” section of our website.
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Our Process
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