Founded in 1946, The Tombras Group is a full service advertising agency headquartered in Knoxville, Tennessee. SPA had been working with Tombras Group on numerous renovation projects within their suburban office space in an attempt to adapt it to align with the rapidly changing nature of the advertising business. With their existing building lacking space for additional staff growth and to meet their desire for greater visibility within the community, the Tombras Group made the decision in early 2016 to move their headquarters to a prime downtown location in the former offices of the Knoxville Utilities Board, an imposing utilitarian building which had been vacant for over a decade. The complex renovation process required a deep understanding of the rich history of the building over the past 100 years. Through this research, Sanders Pace Architecture developed an innovative renovation strategy that was rooted in the historic logic of the building’s structure and its unique evolution over time.
With a need for over 50,000 square feet of corporate office and creative space, The Tombras Group had the capacity to tackle the building as a single tenant project. The renovation includes six levels of creative space with over 250 employees, establishing The Tombras Group a vital participant in the ongoing resurgence of Knoxville’s downtown core. The existing building was fully renovated along with the removal and replacement of the exterior envelope which now brings much needed natural light into a series of shared interior spaces. At street level, a new double height lobby space was created, giving a heart to the building that didn’t exist prior. Programmatic elements were grouped per floor, serving as clear departments for the multi-faceted agency. A small café space open to the public was reserved at the main street level corner to activate an important node within its urban context. A new roof-level penthouse was added to create flexible employee collaborative spaces. Exterior spaces wrapped with vegetation occupy both rooftops creating exterior work and break areas for employees.
Sanders Pace Architecture worked closely with the Tombras Group to explore facade solutions that register at the scale of the street and sidewalk, as well as holding a strong identity at the scale of the city itself. Fenestration and facade patterns were explored iteratively, and ultimately proposed as a unified, layered composition, allowing the overall facade to gain a sense of subtle variety and depth. At street level, the South Gay Street sidewalk is protected by a continuous overhead awning system and large expanses of clear glass storefront activate the West Church Avenue streetscape. At City scale, the massing of the building, along with the penthouse addition, participates seamlessly in the rise in height and density moving from south to north along the Gay Street corridor.