Working with What We Already Have - Focusing on Adaptive Reuse Projects

Cultural shifts, economic turbulence, and zoning changes are all part of why a business vacates a building, neighborhoods change directions and move from commercial to residential or vice versa, and skeleton structures are abandoned on the sidewalk, making passersby feel stuck in a time bubble of the era now gone.

Adaptive Reuse projects are not just an opportunity to breathe new life into a forgotten neighborhood. These projects tend to take some serious imagination as you rethink how movement will restructure in a space originally designed for a particular concept. 

In 2016, we partnered with the owners of White Rock Coffee to transform the vacant Pizza Hut, next door to their cafe, into an extension of their brand and style as a Coffee Lab.

The two year project provided a place that looks like it’s always been there. It blends beautifully with the original cafe structure while playfully using some of the original Pizza Hut structural shapes to create a fun adaption. 

We always start our design process by looking at the landscape. But how is this landscape defined? Over time the land use has evolved, directly affected by the spaces surrounding it and the decades of changes that come from circulation around the site, water and drainage patterns, and landscape flora and fauna that have shifted. Then there is the social landscape, the transformation of neighborhoods, definition of districts, and the decades of stylistic change influencing the new design. 

Just like one of our latest Adaptive Reuse projects, 1808, where we blended a modern concept within one of Dallas’ historic neighborhoods.

Conscious building is about thinking of the community as much as thinking about the environment. For us, design is an integrated approach that includes a client’s needs and wants, as much as the context of the neighborhood, to the future legacy we are impacting with the decisions we implement today.