Madam C.J. Walker was the first self-made woman millionaire in the United States. A Black woman from the South, she made a fortune training and empowering Black women to care for their hair in the early 1900s—before women even had the right to vote in the U.S. Villa Lewaro, Walker’s home in Irvington, New York, was constructed in 1918 and became a gathering place for the leaders of the Harlem Renaissance. Visitors included Zora Neale Hurston, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Langston Hughes.

Villa Lewaro is a testament to Walker’s story and the lives she impacted in the past, and today it also is a source of inspiration for future entrepreneurs. In 2018 it was bought by the New Voices Foundation, which “offers women of color entrepreneurs access, capital, and expertise to scale their businesses through funding, networking, and learning opportunities.”

That's a big part of the power of preservation; what we preserve is elevated in cultural significance and cared for so that future generations can experience and come to understand a piece of history that we find important. Indeed, the impetus behind preservation stems from people—regardless of nationality, race, or gender—wanting to be able to pass down stories of their heritage to future generations. This instinct connects deeply with sustainability. After all, we can only transmit value to the future if there is a future. That's only possible if we think of sustainability as our key to meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

For me, preservation and climate action have always been closely intertwined, and yet too often I have found that conversations around building-related climate action typically take place in silos. From building permitting to sweeping conferences, I’ve observed these conversations getting subdivided into distinct discussions about architecture, preservation, sustainability, climate action, and racial and social impacts, as if these topics are independent of each other.

As a Black American woman, a licensed architect, and a trained historic preservationist specializing in sustainability, I've witnessed firsthand how the solutions we seek for climate action and social equity are actually found at the intersections of our disciplines. It's time to break down those walls and recognize that everything is connected. When we consider climate action holistically, the solutions start to become much more obvious.

The Uncomfortable Truth: Climate Change, the Built Environment, and Social Injustice

We can't talk about climate change without addressing social inequity. As Hop Hopkins, former director of Organizational Transformation for the Sierra Club, powerfully stated in his article, “Racism is Killing the Planet”:

You can't have climate change without sacrifice zones, and you can't have sacrifice zones without disposable people, and you can't have disposable people without racism…. The richest people need white supremacy to remain invisible so they can continue to plunder our planet. They need those sacrifice zones and the racism that justifies them, or they'll have nowhere to put their trash and pollution.

The reality is that carbon pollution is impacting us all—but evidently some much more than others. Sustainability is often expressed as the sum of a triple bottom line of benefits—environment, economy, and equity. While environmental and economic aspects tend to get ample attention from those concerned with sustainability, equity has not always been as clearly addressed. This omission is hugely misguided and crucial to change, because low-income people and people of color are often disproportionately burdened by environmental issues. Waste sites and polluting factories are more likely to be located near these communities, negatively impacting the residents’ health and well-being.

At the same time, preservation in the U.S. has been focused for too long on elevating the stories of "dead, white, rich men" and high-style architecture, while ignoring the stories of marginalized people and nondescript buildings. By celebrating a wider range of histories, preservationists are  able to elevate additional buildings to historic status and create a more inclusive view of the past. That, in turn, is helping to shape a more equitable future.

The Packing House in Cambridge, Maryland, highlights the impact of reusing a historic building on a community. Originally built as a furniture factory in the early 20^th century, the Packing House became part of the Phillips Packing Company empire, which at one point in time was the largest producer of canned tomatoes in the world and employed more than 2,000 people in the small Eastern Shore town. The packing company had an integrated workforce, but Cambridge had a segregated private life. In the early 1960s, clashes between civil rights activists and segregationists put the town in the national news, resulting in the Kennedy administration-brokered “Treaty of Cambridge”. Although the Packing House was not destroyed in the civil unrest surrounding the struggle for desegregation, it was ultimately abandoned when the company left the city.  The building sat vacant for decades, slowly rusting away—a reminder of what was once an economic engine for the community.

Its recent renovation reimagined the building as an incubator space supporting local economic opportunities for a disinvested community. Housing a mix of creative entrepreneurs, food production, and eateries, the building is once again a hub for a diverse workforce and a place where varied conversations about Cambridge happen.

The impact of projects like these shows why we can't afford to see buildings without high architectural value as disposable, undervaluing the histories of marginalized people. Every preservation or adaptive reuse project is an opportunity to understand and work with a unique combination of social and performance issues. Building reuse encourages design that is rooted in place; enhances community, cultural, and environmental contexts; and allows us to conceive a more equitable future.

The Deep Green Retrofit

This sustainable stewardship can manifest in many ways, but one of the most exciting developments in our field is the concept of deep green retrofits—extensive renovations that dramatically improve a building's energy performance.

While these retrofits can be challenging for historic buildings—we can't just create a new building envelope that completely changes the look of the building, for instance—innovative approaches are possible. Increasingly, organizations like the Zero Net Carbon Collaboration for Existing and Historic Building (ZNCC) and the Climate Heritage Network are working to provide guidance on how to work with existing buildings. Additionally, new tools like OSCAR, the Online Sustainable Conservation Assistance Resource, and the Carbon Avoidance Retrofit Estimator (CARE) allow architects and designers to compare the total carbon impacts of different options from renovation to replacement, ensuring decarbonization is a regular part of the design discussion.

Detroit’s Michigan Central Station provides a very clear example of the benefits of deep retrofits. By reusing and improving the existing building—and keeping tons of building materials out of landfills—more than 15,000 tons of embodied carbon were preserved, and the building’s energy use was reduced by a third.

At Quinn Evans we got the opportunity to put preservation and sustainable reuse front and center with our Compound Rowhouses project in Baltimore. We designed the retrofit of four historic row houses into group housing for artists. While the client, The Compound artist collective, was already deeply committed to environmentally friendly building practices, the project budget was strained by the deteriorated masonry envelope and the need to maximize the number of rooms available for affordable housing and studio space. This project required a creative solution that balanced sustainability with cost.

The solution was to insert a new continuous air barrier inside the existing walls (see Figure 1). Additions above and behind the existing volume incorporate a very high-performance envelope to offset a small, but unavoidable, amount of air leakage from the existing masonry. The redesign was aided by having one of our CPHCs (Certified Passive House Consultant) as the lead architect on the project who worked with other CPHCs and CPHBs (Certified Passive House Builder) on the design team to ensure that penetrations were sealed and the air barrier maintained. Careful WUFI analysis was completed on the wall assemblies and reviewed with Phius to avoid potential building failure issues—like mold—which can result if the insulation of the interior of the masonry wall is detailed incorrectly. The final product provides a sustainable, affordable housing option in a historic area and will achieve Passive House masonry retrofit pre-certification, one of the first such retrofits in Maryland. Learn more about the project on the Passive House podcast; transcript available here.

Leading the Way to a More Sustainable Future

While the adaptive reuse of existing and historic buildings is finally being brought into the climate action conversation, unfortunately, there are too many who still believe that historic buildings must be torn down and replaced by modern, high-performing buildings to save energy. The National Trust for Historic Preservation, among others, has conducted studies that prove the opposite. In fact, if you were to tear down a historic building and replace it with a new, high-performing building of the same size and massing, in most cases, it would take a minimum of 20 years of operational carbon savings to recoup the carbon released into the atmosphere by the demolition.

The reality is that there are trillions of square feet of existing buildings in the world, and based on Architecture 2030 research, we know that two-thirds of our current building stock will still be here in 2050. We are already all being impacted by climate change, and we simply cannot demolish and rebuild our way to carbon neutrality.

The good news is that as people who work with the built environment—architects, preservationists, sustainability practitioners, and contractors—we are uniquely prepared to step up and help our clients make better decisions. Part of solving a problem is looking at it from many angles and incorporating diverse voices and insights to create the best solution.

So, let's make sure we're telling an inclusive history to elevate the human experience of existing places. Great design is centered around people, and we are stewards of this place and time that we occupy. Let's lean into the joy and power that comes from breaking silos and working together to reimagine a future where no one is disposable, and everyone has the space to thrive. Building reuse is climate action and a powerful tool for social justice, too. It's time we embrace its full potential.