POWER

The relocation of Kansas City Ballet (KCB) involved careful preservation and adaptive reuse of the 52,000-square-foot historic Power House at Kansas City's Union Station, a former coal-burning plant designed by Jarvis Hunt and completed in 1914. Listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 2004, the building sat abandoned from the 1970s until 2006. Rehabilitation of the building, adhering to The Secretary of the Interior's Standards for the Treatment of Historic Properties, included reinforcement to the building's structural elements, replacement of concrete, a new roof, and major repairs to masonry, terra cotta detailing and fenestration. In the year following its grand opening, the building was recognized with more than a dozen awards for excellence in design and preservation, including a prestigious National Preservation Honor Award from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, a National Honor Award from the American Institute of Architects, and the Project of the Year Award from the International Concrete Restoration Institute. Power chronicles the award-winning preservation and transformation of this historic facility, outlining the many constraints and opportunities the project team met along the way. AUTHOR: As BNIM's director of design, Steve McDowell is an innovator, exploring ideas related to site, environment and technical investigation. Steve's work is setting new standards in high performance design focused on people-their health, productivity and lifting the human spirit through design. Steve and his work have been recognized with more than 300 awards for design excellence and industry leadership. Among others, his awards include the prestigious National Preservation Honor Award from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, National AIA Honor Awards, Top Ten Green Project Awards from AIA's Committee on the Environment and the AIA National Firm Award, the industry's highest honor bestowed on architectural firms in the U.S. Marlon Blackwell, FAIA, is a practicing architect in Fayetteville, Arkansas, and serves as Distinguished Professor and Department Head in the Fay Jones School of Architecture at the University of Arkansas. Working outside the architectural mainstream, his architecture is based in design strategies that draw upon vernaculars and the contradictions of place; strategies that seek to transgress conventional boundaries for architecture. Work produced in his professional office, Marlon Blackwell Architect, has received national and international recognition with numerous design awards and significant publication in books, architectural journals and magazines. Blackwell received the 2012 Architecture Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. 120 photographs and 50 illustrations