RESEARCH

A very important part of what we do when designing adaptive reuse project is research. It isn't always evident what aspects of a given building are original and what was added over its lifetime. We strive to understand what drove the decisions to modify these buildings over time, and how these modifications impact our perception of the building today. Sometimes this process is a physical exploration of the building, a peeling back of these layers of history in an excavation of the past. Other times our research extends to historical plans or photographs of the building. Yesterday we visited with the head archivist at Arizona State University's archives department in an attempt to gain some insights into one of our new projects; a beautiful mid century building in downtown Scottsdale.