First Phase of Restoration of 1894 Storey Building At Hope Waddell Institution Completed

The first phase of the restoration of the 1894 Premier Building at Hope Waddell Institution, Calabar has been completed.

The restoration of the ancient building was announced last year April during the commemoration of the International Day of Monuments and Sites, by the Foundation for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage in Nigeria (FOPCHEN).

The foundation had announced that it had received a grant from Gerda Henkel Stiftung to restore and return to use the iconic one-storey building built in 1894 and regarded as one of the earliest known examples of educational buildings erected by missionaries in Nigeria.

“Today we are pleased to announce that the first major phase of the project has been completed.

“In the last one year FOPCHEN workers have been on site working five to six days a week to deliver this project in a timely manner,” said the programme director/ Principal Investigator, Professor Bekeh Ukelina in a media chat.

“Our team has worked really hard to deliver the product that you see here in spite of the several months of severe currency crunch the country went through. We could not have achieved what you see here without Gerda Henkel’s support, our team of expert architects and the dedicated carpenters.

“What is happening here at the premier building are restoration works, taking the building back to when it was first assembled using indigenous wood from Cross River State.”

Briefing journalists, Dr. Tokie Laotan-Brown, the lead heritage architect on the project said, “By assessing the premier building, we carefully observed, surveyed and documented it. We identified six damage topologies indicating a vulnerable structural state with a significant risk of collapse. It was crucial to detect the critical pathologies and defects, while discovering a bit of history under layers of decayed Scot’s Pine over more than a century.”

He said it was based on these damage topologies that the restoration team devised a treatment approach to restore and curtail the immediate collapse of the building while introducing indigenous timbers.

It was gathered that In restoring the building, the team was conscious of carbon footprints and sourced all of its wood within Cross River State and processed the woods locally.

The site architect, Robert Utietiang told reporters that they used four types of wood throughout the site.

He said, “We used teak, Black Afara, White Afara, and Iroko. We selected these woods because they are hardwoods and were the most environmentally suitable and compatible with the building.”

It was gathered that with the completion of the first phase, the building is fully secured and there is no risk of collapse and all the walls of the building which were lost have been restored.

The second phase of the project will focus on finishing works.

At the completion of the project, a technical manual will be published, the foundation said.