Former Studebaker assembly plant begins $17 million transformation into high-tech center

Posted on Jan 22, 2017 in Featured | 2 comments

Renderings by Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture.

As early as this fall, new tenants could start moving into the last remaining Studebaker assembly building in South Bend, and though the new resident may not have anything at all to do with the auto industry, the owner of the massive building has said he plans to keep its history in mind during its renovation.

Designed by architect Albert Kahn and built in 1923 with the same sturdy steel-reinforced concrete system as many of Kahn’s other automotive assembly plants – including the Packard plant in Detroit – the six-story, 800,000-plus-square-foot assembly plant known as Building 84 has managed to stick around for the 50-plus years since Studebaker abandoned operations there, thanks in part to its construction and to a number of smaller businesses that continued to occupy it since.

Still, Building 84 never saw the same amount of activity as when Larks and Hawks flew from its doors, and it subsequently began to deteriorate, something developer and South Bend business owner Kevin Smith decided to change. After converting the nearby Union Station into a data center, he bought Building 84 despite the extensive graffiti and trash fires cropping up in the building and announced plans in 2012 to convert it into a mixed-use high-tech center, essentially an extension of Union Station.

As the South Bend Tribune reported this week, Smith and the Chicago architecture firm Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill revealed more detailed plans and renderings that show pretty much all of the Albert Kahn structure remaining, but reworked to provide office space, data storage space, residences, and restaurants.

“You can’t ignore your heritage,” Smith told the Tribune earlier this year. “You have to reclaim it. Let’s look back on our history and build on it.”

One of the more striking aspects of Smith’s plan involves the “courtyard,” a section of the plant that opened up when a blizzard took out a section of roof in 1978. Smith intends to have a glass-topped atrium built in that space and warmed by the waste heat generated by the computers and servers in the data center in Union Station. Smith intends to link the data center to Building 84 via a tunnel that passes underneath the railroad tracks that separate the two buildings.

In total, Smith said he plans to spend about $17.5 million to transform Buidling 84, about $8 million of which the city of South Bend will contribute — specifically for environmental cleanup and the construction of a parking lot. Smith already began the renovation earlier this year and expects the entire project to last up to 10 years; once complete, he envisions the building supporting as many as 3,000 jobs.

Among other functions, Building 84 housed the final assembly line for all Studebakers except the Avanti until Studebaker removed all assembly operations to Hamilton, Ontario, at the end of 1963. The Avanti assembly buildings – buildings 108, 33, 34, 35, and 149S – have all since been demolished, as has the portion of the Hamilton plant that housed the assembly operations and the Los Angeles assembly plant. Of the dozens of buildings that Studebaker occupied in and around South Bend, only Building 84, the former administration building, and a handful of others survive.