Page 12 - Delaware Lawyer - Spring 2019

FEATURE
David C. Shelton
A Building
Finding a corporate home and a driver of economic growth.
The word that came to mind was dismal. Yep. That summed it up. And it was a charitable characterization at that.
10 DELAWARE LAWYER SPRING 2019
We were standing in the Mt. Cuba Room, smack in the middle of the 11th floor of the historic DuPont Building, just a month before starting the demolition that would be the first step in the transformation of a chunk of the building’s interior into the global head- quarters of The Chemours Company. What were we going to do with this thor- oughly unremarkable space? It was large and felt cramped at the same time (diffi- cult to pull off). It was windowless, the ceilings were low, and the audible buzzing of lowest-bidder fluorescent lights gave it all the charm of a minimum-security prison holding cell. It had once been used as a conference room, where people were to congregate and share ideas, maybe even proffer an innovative solution. Not the kind of incubator to fit our new company, I remember thinking. Not this room.
The Mt. Cuba Room seemed like a fit- ting brick-and-mortar symbol of where we found ourselves as a just-spun startup saddled with a number of parting gifts,
including a sizeable debt load, a host of legacy liabilities, and now the DuPont Building.
The DuPont Building, which takes up an entire city block and had an annual op- erating budget more fitting for a university campus, was built in three stages, starting right in the middle of the Edwardian Era. It is an Italian Renaissance edifice, a wild- ly popular architectural style in those days for major corporations and governments that wanted to project power and perma- nence. Inside, the building was designed for hierarchy — offices of every size to accord every stripe, with long, narrow corridors that promoted isolation — ex- actly the opposite of what The Chemours Company wanted to evoke in its workspace.
Now back to the Mt. Cuba Room.
When we pushed up the drop-ceiling tiles for a look around, prepared for the sight of a century-and-a-half old configu- ration of wires, pipes and HVAC duct work, we were stunned. What we saw were the remains of what had once been a
as Metaphor