The Seacrest Partners project involved the restoration, rehabilitation and adaptive reuse of a building newly eligible as a historic structure. Located on Savannah’s historic Forsyth Park within the Victorian Planned Neighborhood Conservation District, the building in 2010 was eligible for the National Register of Historic Places. All completed work followed the Secretary of Interior’s Standards for Rehabilitation and Guidelines for Rehabilitating Historic Buildings. The building was designed in 1961 by Aeck Associates as a regional showcase for IBM Corporation. Its waffle slab roof construction pioneered the technique in the area.

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The majority of the rehabilitation occurred to the property’s interior. All non-historic wall partitions and alterations were removed and all original partitions were retained and all non-historic drop ceilings were removed to showcase the original concrete waffle slab ceiling.

The property is noteworthy in that it has been used for its historic purpose and has required minimal change to the defining characteristics of the building, its site and its environment. Both the historic character of the open plan and the exposed structure have been preserved, and the alteration of historic material that defines the character of the building has been avoided. The space is occupied as a modern office, much in the way it was originally designed.

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This building’s rehabilitation has had a significant impact on both its immediate neighborhood and the community. The property had been vacant for quite a while and its renovation has re-energized its place at the table on the southwest corner of historic Forsyth Park. It has also been a beacon for modern preservation and helps bring respect to a new era of architecture uncommon to Savannah’s past preservation efforts.