Restoring a Mid-Century Landmark for Modern Use: Lessons From the Canham Restoration Project

Not every landmark worth saving looks like a courthouse or a cathedral. Some of the most consequential restoration work happens inside buildings that were never meant to be beautiful in the first place — they were meant to perform. The Canham Natatorium at the University of Michigan is one of those buildings: a mid-century competitive swimming facility that, decades after it opened, still had to function at a championship level every single day it was in use. There was no off-season for the roof, the air handlers, or the pool itself. When JC Beal Construction took on its renovation, the question wasn't just how to restore an aging structure — it was how to do it without ever truly closing it.

That distinction matters for institutional owners weighing a restoration of their own mid-century assets. A 1960s or 1970s building rarely carries the same preservation mystique as an 1890s commercial block, but it often carries something harder to replace: irreplaceable function, embedded infrastructure, and a campus or community that has no backup facility to fall into while work gets done. Restoring it "precisely as intended" means restoring the performance the building was built to deliver, not just its appearance.

What Made the Natatorium Different

The Canham project addressed the deficiencies that quietly accumulate in any high-use mid-century facility: roof repair, new lighting, air handling and humidity control, pool lining, and water filtration. None of those line items are glamorous on their own. Together, in a natatorium, they are existential. Humidity control in a pool building isn't a comfort feature — it's what keeps structural steel, roof decking, and finishes from corroding from the inside out. Water filtration and pool lining aren't cosmetic — they're the difference between a facility that meets competitive standards and one that doesn't.

The complicating factor was scale and elevation. The scope of work sat roughly 40 feet above an active pool deck, inside a building that athletic programs still needed to use. That combination — height, moisture, and an occupied schedule — is exactly the kind of condition that turns a straightforward renovation into a logistics problem first and a construction problem second.

Solving the Sequencing Problem Before the Construction Problem

JC Beal's answer was 15,000 square feet of staging platforms built above the pool deck, which turned the renovation into what amounted to a project within a project. Rather than sequencing the work end to end — roof, then lighting, then mechanical, then pool systems, each waiting on the last — the team broke the scope into eight overlapping components that could proceed simultaneously without colliding with each other or with the building's ongoing use. That critical-path approach was recognized with a Pyramid Award for Best Innovation, but the award was really a byproduct. The actual achievement was compressing a multi-year disruption into a schedule the university's swimming programs could live with.

This is the part of institutional restoration work that rarely shows up in a proposal's scope-of-work section but almost always determines whether a project succeeds: the sequencing plan is the design. On an occupied, mid-century institutional building, the order of operations — what gets staged where, what gets isolated from what, what can run in parallel without one trade's dust, noise, or vibration undoing another trade's work — is as much an engineering problem as the mechanical systems themselves.

Why This Matters Beyond Natatoriums

Institutional and commercial owners carrying mid-century buildings — gymnasiums, hospitals, civic halls, manufacturing-era commercial blocks — face a version of the Canham problem even when there's no pool involved. The building has decades of accumulated infrastructure debt. It has to keep serving its occupants, patients, students, or tenants through the work. And it was built to a standard of utility rather than a standard of ornament, which means the restoration conversation isn't about matching a cornice profile — it's about matching performance to current code, current climate demands, and current use, without losing what made the building reliable in the first place.

Getting that right starts well before the first staging platform goes up. It starts with an honest assessment of what's actually failing versus what's merely dated, a phasing plan built around the building's real operating calendar, and a construction partner who has already solved the problem of doing major mechanical and envelope work above an occupied space without shutting that space down. Those are credentials, not slogans — and they're the reason an owner evaluates a contractor's project history as closely as its bid.

Bringing the Same Discipline to Your Building

Detroit and Toledo are full of mid-century institutional buildings quietly approaching the same inflection point the Natatorium reached: still structurally sound, still serving their purpose, but carrying infrastructure that is past its intended service life. These buildings don't always get the preservation attention that pre-war landmarks do, but the stakes for getting the restoration right — for owners, for occupants, for the institutions that depend on them — are every bit as high.

If your organization is weighing a renovation of an aging institutional facility and needs a partner who can sequence complex, occupied-building work without disrupting the people who rely on it, connect with our team to talk through what restoring your building precisely as intended would actually look like.