By Neil Offen

noffen@heraldsun.com; 419-6646

DURHAM — With its forklift tines protruding like giant buck teeth, the Bobcat rolled down the dusty hallway of the oldest building on the Durham Tech campus. It gathered chunks of broken concrete, maneuvering among the dangling cables and strewn piles of steel brackets, pipes and disassembled toilets.

At the other end of the White Building, at desks festooned with brightly colored plants in offices with tasteful beige carpets, administrators in the college’s human resources and IT departments worked quietly at their computers and answered their phones amid the peaceful tranquillity.

The extreme makeover of the White Building proceeds schizophrenically, phase one a completed success, phase two, a construction staging ground.

“Yeah, it’s always harder to do it this way,” said Cory Smith, the project superintendent for the general contractor, Central Builders of Mebane. “To phase a job is always more difficult than doing it all at one time. But this is what we had to do. We had no choice.”

Durham Tech, cramped for space, couldn’t afford to shut down the building completely while restoration work took place; it needed part of the building for offices and classrooms. So for the last year or so it has moved people and offices back and forth to different parts of the White Building and across campus while renovation has been underway.

Construction officials acknowledged that it probably would have been easier to raze the entire structure and start from scratch, but that would have destroyed history as well.

In 1961, the White Building — whose original part dates to the 1950s — was the first building of the fledgling Durham Industrial Education Center. From 1961 until 1969, it was the only building on the Durham Tech campus.

Over the years, it has housed many classrooms and services — human resources, business, admissions, student records, financial aid, counseling, advising, a cafeteria, a print shop. In 1988, the White Building — which, in fact, is not white at all, but red brick — was named after the school’s founder, Nathaniel White.

But during all that time, the structure was aging badly — out of date in terms of technology, accessibility and infrastructure. “It had passed its prime,” said the project architect, Angela Crawford Easterday of the Raleigh office of MBAJ Architecture. “The building, which had so many programs and administrative functions in it, never really worked well together. It really needed a lot of work. It didn’t give a good impression of the college.”

So “it came down to a judgment call,” said Richard McKown, Durham Tech’s director of facility services, about whether to start fresh with a new building. “But there’s a lot of history here. We wanted to keep it and work around it, bring it up to current standards.”

When the $5.7 million project is completed, the White Building will offer greatly improved accessibility, classrooms equipped with new technology, new windows and roof, a new secondary facade and revamped main entranceways.

The contractor had hoped to finish this summer, in time for the recent beginning of classes.

“But it’s taken a lot longer than we expected,” McKown acknowledged. “There have been numerous surprises. A number of issues have slowed us down, like walls not up to current standards.”

Not only that, they’ve had to move people around and make sure no one heading to a class or an office walked in front of a Bobcat by mistake.

“That’s been difficult,” McKown said. “But when it’s done here, it’s going to be very nice.”