To meet the Rainforest habitat’s criteria, the glazing replacement had to support temperatures of between 75°F and 85°F, humidity levels between 50% and 87% and light transmittance of between 54% and 75%.

Building Enclosure is excited to be joined by Carolyn Kiernat, AIA, principal with Page & Turnbull. Carolyn is here today to talk about all things historic preservation.

In 2022, this beloved theater was carefully restored and expanded with accessibility upgrades, preservation efforts and a stunning “glass box” façade, which helped earn the project a Metamorphosis Award from retrofit magazine for excellence in renovation.

Located at Huntsman’s world scale polyurethane production site in Geismar, Louisiana, the Reliability Excellence Center is a 22,000-square-foot structural steel building which is home to the company’s maintenance, reliability and operational excellence teams.

Land is a limited resource, but demand for construction keeps rising. That situation, paired with the push for greater sustainability, presents a challenge. With adaptive reuse, construction firms can create new spaces without building an entirely new structure.

Since 2005 the share of design projects involving renovations, rehabilitations, additions, and historic preservation grew 14 percent, now accounting for 48 percent of billings at U.S. architecture firms, according to a new survey from the American Institute of Architects.

Slightly elevated from the adjacent street level and sheltered with landscape, an intimate reading garden with wood decking, seating, and fencing provides a pleasant outdoor space in the midst of the site’s busy urban intersection. 

The Essex County West Caldwell School of Technology had served its students for a half century and was in need of a serious renovation, inside and out. Since the original factory was converted into a school in 1976, the only major renovation was the addition of a multipurpose gymnasium in 2002. 

Retrofitting and adaptive reuse of older buildings is often an ideal eco-friendly solution — bringing existing structures up to modern energy efficiency standards without the resource consumption of new construction.

In October, Western’s San Francisco Branch was named a 2021 International Concrete Repair Institute Project of the Year Award Finalist (Historic Category) for renovation and repurposing of the SMUD Museum of Science and Curiosity in Sacramento, Calif.