Moving to a new city can be really stressful. But it can also be really exciting. New restaurants to check out, new friendships to make (and rekindle old ones), new streets to explore, new parks to roam, “new” urban history to understand. I recently moved to Philly (woohoo), and it’s been a really fun puzzle to figure out.
In my efforts to get to know the city a bit better, I attended the Roundhouse Reimagined Symposium last month near Independence Park. It was a great event right up my alley - equal parts history, urban planning and adaptive reuse.
The Roundhouse is a stunning brutalist building with a complicated history. In short, it’s the former Philadelphia Police Headquarters building that “became tainted by its associations with destructive urban renewal initiatives of the 1960s and ‘70s, and police brutality.” It is certainly something to contend with, but it’s not a non-starter (sorry for the double negative). Six proposals for renewal were presented at the symposium, and all of them delicately wove that history into their designs.
This is not the first building with a charged legacy. There are a couple of well informed adaptive reuse examples on the Roundhouse website that include reimagining a prison, a KKK building, and a Nazi concentration camp.
It’s obviously complicated. There are many stories to listen to and many ideas to incorporate into a project like this. But, I am inspired by everybody’s optimism at the event. It truly seems like people in this city want to breathe new life into this building, all while recognizing its past. Every building and every city has a history, it’s just a question of whether or not you want to acknowledge it.