665 South Main
Info Adaptive Reuse of Historic Building on South Main in Fort Worth, TX
Team Bart Shaw, FAIA (Principal Architect), Gable Bostic, AIA
Project Status Permit Review
The original Eagle Steam Bread Bakery Building was a two-story masonry building constructed at 665 S Main Street in 1895, and enlarged in 1907. By 1916 the Eagle Steam Bread Factory was one of the largest bakeries in the southwest, producing 25,000 loaves of bread daily.
The facade that now sits on Main was built in 1927 after 12 feet of the building and the original ornamental facade were demolished to allow for street widening. Today the building is experiencing a variety of structural failures. Walls of the eastern one- story extension collapsed in 2019 and it was demolished entirely in 2020.
In the last decade this area of Main Street, located immediately south of downtown, has dramatically increased in density. Approached by a multi-family developer looking to build a larger project on adjacent the sites (designed by another firm), the architect sought to find a way to retain portions of the building as a protected relic.
Using a new structural system to support the existing portions south and west facades, the “clearly new” building is enriched by the old. The aged character of the century-old masonry enlivens the courtyard and forms a rich arrival sequence.
The mass of the new building is held back, lending transparency to the now open existing structure. The expression of the upper stories is derived from the dimensions of the original masonry openings, with a geometry that cants the openings away from the southern sun and transitions to total transparency on the North.
