Adaptive reuse demands a unique synthesis of technical expertise, environmental responsibility, and architectural imagination. For architects confronted with the challenges of the climate crisis, projects involving adaptive reuse constitute some of the most pressing agendas of today. KPF Principals Lauren Schmidt and Hugh Trumbull have worked across building types and scales to reimagine and revitalize urban contexts around the world. Their work spans KPF’s four distinct approaches to adaptive reuse: conversion, rejuvenation, preservation, and densification.

Lauren and Hugh share a conviction that adaptive reuse is essential to addressing the changing needs of building users and city dwellers. For them, working with existing structures isn’t a constraint—it’s an opportunity to create architecture that is more interesting, and certainly more sustainable, than designing wholly new buildings.

KPF’s work in adaptive reuse spans the firm’s 50-year history, starting with the birth of the firm with the repositioning of an armory on Manhattan’s Upper West Side for ABC Broadcasting. As the firm grew, this portfolio expanded to include increasingly complex projects around the world, from Tour First and Window La Défense in Paris’ La Défense district, to Panorama St. Paul’s in London, to 390 Madison Avenue in New York. Joined by Erin Heidelberger of KPF’s Environmental Performance team, Lauren and Hugh discuss what it means to practice adaptive reuse in 2026, touching on topics from the financials of repositioning to the embodied carbon case for keeping existing structures to the joy of uncovering something unexpected within a building.

Lauren Schmidt (left): For over two decades, Lauren has served as designer and manager for some of KPF’s most notable and complex New York City projects, bringing a focus on maximizing the potential of underutilized or outdated buildings through repositioning. She has contributed management expertise to some of KPF’s most significant recent adaptive reuse projects of the past two decades, including Hudson Commons, 175 Park Avenue, and 660 Fifth Avenue. She holds a board seat on the Design Futures Council and the Salvadori Center and was named one of PWC’s 20 Under 40 Outstanding Women in Construction.

Hugh Trumbull (center): With over 35 years of experience, Hugh Trumbull has brought his materiality and detail-focused design approach to over 30 of the firm’s adaptive reuse projects across scales. From the lobby spaces of 712 Fifth Avenue, 280 Park Avenue, and 60 Wall Street to the building-scale renovations of Centra Metropark and 175 Park Avenue, his repositioning projects are driven by user experience. Hugh has taught design studios at Cornell University and lectured on architectural design, professional practice, and environmental systems. He has also served as a guest critic on design juries for universities including Columbia University and the Parsons School of Design.

Erin Heidelberger (right): As a Senior Environmental Performance Specialist, Erin collaborates with design teams to set ambitious sustainability goals. With a particular focus on measuring and reducing embodied carbon in the built environment, Erin leads KPF’s involvement in the AIA Materials Pledge to reduce carbon emissions. Erin has shared her expertise at events including “Salvaged Futures: Buildings as Material Catalogs,” a panel discussion hosted by Walter P. Moore, the Urban Design Forum’s Roundtable on Embodied Carbon, and at AIANY’s Decarbonization Symposium.

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Erin Heidelberger: Lauren and Hugh, I’m really excited to sit down and talk with you both today. You’re principals here at KPF with extensive experience in adaptive reuse. As a member of the Environmental Performance team, I have a vested interest in the potential of adaptive reuse on the materials and carbon side. Hugh, I’m particularly excited to hear from your perspective how adaptive reuse fits into the history of architecture and how we’ve arrived at this position today at KPF.

Hugh Trumbull: Adaptive reuse is truly part of KPF’s DNA, and some of our most interesting, best work has come from tackling how to reuse or upgrade a building. Lauren and I had a wonderful opportunity to work on a couple of these problems together, and they’re really unique kinds of architecture. We deal with revitalizing our cities and communities a lot. We look at buildings that are derelict and we have to figure out whether we toss them out or rebuild them in a way that is much more appropriate. It’s a very challenging architecture because there are times when people touch architecture and they make a mess of it, and other times when they do something really profound that leads to the next generation of meaningful cultural development within a community.

EH: You touched on that initial decision of—do we throw it out and start new, or do we work with the building that’s there? I’d love to get some insight on what that process looks like.

Lauren Schmidt: As is the case with any project—even more so with adaptive reuse—you really have to uncover and understand what the building is before you can get to that decision. That’s usually a process of discovery: understanding what’s there and paring back to find the values that exist in it. That happens in a lot of different ways, depending on the project and the client and what their appetite is. Each project is a very unique journey of discovery.

HT: Painful sometimes. But also very rewarding.

LS: Very, very rewarding. And it’s really something like building a relationship with the building—and with the client and the team too. It’s something that gets built over time.

HT: It’s a dialogue. It’s very difficult to approach an adaptive reuse building with a preconceived idea about what it needs to be. You really need to go in and listen to it, poke around. It has to do with looking at the old drawings, maybe the architect’s original conception of what that building was supposed to be and never really got there. Sometimes you find false work within the building that doesn’t need to be there—and maybe it’s a great thing to brush that out and clean it up. Sometimes you begin to see things within a building that are absolutely critical to its nature, and then the idea of bringing that out and making it more apparent, or tweaking it so that it becomes the central focus of the building.

LS: It goes through iterations. A lot of times the client has an idea of what they want, and then you get started and realize—actually, we need to go this way instead of that way. Or maybe it’s somehow both. That’s really a process. The ones Hugh and I have worked on together, we found that we started with one thing and it turned into another. And that doesn’t necessarily mean the budget grew—it just means that some of what you’re able to do may change.

HT: And, of course, sometimes the budgets do grow. And a lot of times the strategies are about—if we add this, we can generate this much more revenue, and therefore we can have more budget to do something else. Or we can trim this and use that area somewhere else. We have some great examples of that. For 390 Madison, which is a wonderful investigation of cut and fill: moving pieces around to take a building that was very compressed in its floor-to-floor, extracting pieces out of it, putting more area on top, and letting the whole building breathe in a way that it never really had before.

LS: And that’s something that happens even when the outermost skin has to stay. On 660 Fifth Avenue, for example, the building was overbuilt for current zoning because it was built pre-zoning. So, we were already overbuilt going in. We were redoing the façade from a performance standpoint, most importantly, as well as the building systems. We knew we had to grow by a little bit to account for the depth of the new façade.

EH: From my perspective, 660 is such a great example of a case where we were able to take a building that really wasn’t up to modern standards—both on the systems and performance side, but also in terms of the experience of being in and working in that building. We were able to maintain all those materials and all of that embodied carbon already in place and deliver a project that makes an exciting and inspiring workplace. We improved it from a systems perspective, from an energy performance standpoint, and in terms of occupant experience—because keeping a building that no one wants to be in, that isn’t inspiring, is not a great use of the new materials going in. It really needs to end up as meaningful architecture. 660 is an example where we didn’t change the footprint much, weren’t majorly changing the volume, but we drastically changed the experience.

HT: Very often the idea is that you’re approaching a building in a way that is not very enticing, and we have to change that and find a new way in. One of the things we’ve done on a number of projects is find a new urbanism—bringing a much more urbanistic approach to the front door of buildings. We see that across a number of projects.

We talked about performative quality—having to strip the skin off or change something because it’s past its lifetime. But we can also talk about the fifth façade, that idea of looking down on a building and asking—what do you do with the roof? For a long time, those roofs haven’t been used. Terraces, gardens, inside-outside relationships, how the ground plane flows into the building, how the roofs flow into the building, how they can be stepped so that each floor can have a unique inside-outside experience—this is something we see as a cultural movement right now. And it’s forcing a change.

There’s also this characteristic of finding something special. How do you read the building? How do you look at it in a way that extracts a unique quality—whether it’s a response to its context, or to the building’s structure itself. The things the building was trying to do that it hasn’t really achieved yet. You lead it to finding a higher vision. But it’s also about bringing something fresh. And that to me is the joy of architecture—how do you add that little extra something? To bring light to the building, in its true nature.

LS: And that becomes something that future occupants of the building really appreciate. There’s a sense of history to it—we’re able to highlight things that were buried before and are really amazing, and give it a story. And then add new things that really couple with that. That happens in a lot of different ways, whether it be a lobby space, a full building, or a space within a building. You find a storytelling that exists, similar to cities and how they’re renovated and rejuvenated over time. I think people are really drawn to that.

HT: We’ve been talking a lot about workspace, but a lot of it breaks down to the financials of a project. One of the things we’ve noticed is that when you start with a building that somebody can pick up at a bottom-dollar price, that allows you to infuse more into it because there isn’t a big burden behind them. I think that’s happened on Centra Metropark, on 175 Park Avenue, on a number of buildings that nobody was looking at because they seemed to be worthless. But then, through smart design, with very little money you can come in and do something quite special.

Whereas with a new building, when you start from scratch, you have preconceived notions about what it’s supposed to be, and you just barely get back to that. There are all these burdens and schedules and so forth. But when you have the opportunity to go into an existing building, sometimes you have to be very careful about what to do and what not to do. And then there’s the joy of working through a spreadsheet on how much things cost—what does it cost to snip this piece of column, take out that beam, rip off the façade here or what have you.

EH: You brought up Centra and 175 Park and that perception of them as almost worthless or low-value buildings that then opened up more capital. What is that process like? Take us through that first day going to visit either of those buildings. Do you immediately have a vision? We talked about how it takes time, how you have to get to know the building and there are going to be a lot of turns in the process. But what is that first experience like, going to these completely obsolete buildings? Do you have a vision in mind, or does it take a lot of work to tease it out?

HT: All I can tell you is when I first went to Centra, I looked at the building and thought—this is great. It's an L. I can do something with an L. It was just a simple shape, but Ls make space. So we made the building look twice as big. We created a huge urban plaza and some really dramatic light. Overall, the building became a gateway for continued development. As you flow into the building, you come to a lobby captured in a garden, and the two workspaces on either side really just support that newfound private garden.

EH: I love that—the thought that it was almost not even necessarily the building itself, but the landscape and the setting the building was in. I think a lot of times people can overlook that as they're approaching and trying to think about what's there. From my perspective, the structure of any obsolete building is typically the last to go. We talked about façades—façades reach the end of their service life pretty quickly. Systems even more quickly. That structure is such a hot spot for embodied carbon—a big volume of materials. So, whenever we can strip back to that and work with it, it's such a win. But I know that in Centra and 175 Park you had some competing problems with the structures that were there.

HT: Yeah. I think the lesson we learned most was that there's always something unexpected. 175 Park was like a big block of clay. What we realized is that if we start slicing and pulling things out, we can add and move stuff around. And then we look at the context—this suburban atmosphere—and think: can we just gather the forest that's around us and bring it into the building? Let the building really be an inside-outside experience. So when you drive up, when you move through the building on entry—a huge new entry concept—as you flow in, you come to a lobby captured in a garden, and the two workspaces on either side really just support that private garden.

One of the true things that happens with reusing a building is that the construction schedule can often go quicker because there's something already there. And if you have that site and tear the building out, you have a big hole in the ground that actually has to go deeper because you had to pull out that building. So you have all this extra expense. Sometimes it's not just the new building construction—it's taking out the building and all its ramifications that drives the price way up. It's compounded.

LS: Going from that—Hudson Commons was a case where there was additional FAR available on the site. But when we went into the existing building, we found a huge raised floor and a huge drop ceiling. Once those were opened up, you had these beautiful concrete fluted columns and a lot of structural capacity given what the building was originally designed for. And there was a brick facade on the existing building that was actually needed for insulation, but besides that it was performing wonderfully. So, we were able to literally just point and paint it and use the budget for other things that were actually really beneficial.

HT: Everybody has to embrace it and get excited about it. The history of working on this kind of architecture goes throughout the history of architecture itself. I think some of the greatest art is repositioning art. We've seen it with I.M. Pei going to the Louvre—a building that was probably the biggest museum in the world, becoming twice as effective because of this modern intervention.

One of my favorite buildings is the mosque at Córdoba, and it is one of many buildings around the world that have had a very violent history. It starts with a Roman temple, then gets repositioned into a mosque, which has three or four iterations that each stamp on the preceding ones. Then the Catholic Church comes in and rips out the heart of it and puts in a Gothic cathedral. Then that's not enough, so they put a Renaissance cathedral on top of that, and it just keeps going. And now you have an edifice which is a very meaningful marker of what it is to be Spain. That kind of meaningfulness—adding on to your culture, to civilization, to your community—is a very rewarding architectural endeavor.

LS: And it's something we see as having been the past and the present, and it's certainly the future of architecture as well. Cities are constantly being reimagined, populations change, and how things work in the city and its neighborhoods is constantly moving. That's the whole point—it's a living organism. And we're going to continue to see it, not just here in New York. We see it globally, and I think it will continue to grow.

HT: One Madison Avenue, from what I understand, the challenge of that project had to do with really looking at the bones and understanding the cost value of one approach versus another. The idea to strategically thread a new core through the building without disrupting the rest of it was a unique approach.

EH: One of my favorite outcomes of One Madison is that great amenity and terrace where we transfer between the structures. That's something you only get because we kept the building. If we hadn't, that wouldn't be there. People can sometimes think of adaptive reuse as limiting—we can't do this or we can't do that. But there are all these unexpected benefits that come out when you really get into it, that unlock so much in the building.

HT: I think Hudson Commons and One Madison are two examples of adding on to a building while allowing the original building to show through. That's a really wonderful quality. When you look back at the city, you can see a building and understand there are two generations built on top of each other. In New York, it probably works better than anywhere else—as you look across the skyline, you see building on top of building, just because of the way everything's pushed together. But to see a New York building that is literally a building on top of another building—it takes it to the next level. Those are the kind of found discoveries that make repositioning such unique work to do.

EH: I'm excited to see how we continue to grow this knowledge, how new challenges come up, and how we continue to face them. Thank you both so much for sitting down for this conversation today.

HT: Thank you.

LS: Thanks.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity. The full conversation can be found in the above linked YouTube video.