Since the Philadelphia police moved their headquarters out of the Roundhouse building on Race Street in 2021, city officials and residents have struggled with the question of what to do with the structure.
Should it be demolished, along with the legacy of police brutality that it carries for many people? Should the whole block, with its large parking lot, be redeveloped into badly needed affordable housing? Or should the distinctive curved, modernist building be adapted to a new use? Is it even feasible to preserve it?
For a group of designers, planners, preservationists and architecture enthusiasts who gathered for a symposium last week, the answer was clear: The building is a treasure that can and must be saved, and has the potential to be converted into a valuable asset that helps transform and uplift an underdeveloped section of Center City.
The Roundhouse is “a great building, a building of international importance, a beautiful building, one that reminds me at least of an abstracted version of one of Rome’s undulating Baroque facades,” Inquirer architecture critic Inga Saffron said. “It would be an act of Philistine ignorance if Philadelphia were to demolish such an important work of architecture and local history, however painful and disturbing some of that history is.”
To that end, the Preservation Alliance of Philadelphia and the historic preservation organization Docomomo held a design competition for “visionary” adaptive reuses of the building. It yielded more than 30 submissions, including six winning concepts that were presented last Wednesday at WHYY’s studios, across the street from the Roundhouse.
The designs included elements like a new intercity bus station, a soaring, glass-walled addition to the Race Street front plaza, a community land trust with condominiums, a school, a healthcare facility, artists’ studios and a museum of citizen rights.
Here are the six concepts and some of their main features.
An intercity bus station
Volunteer designers from the nonprofit Design Advocacy Group proposed turning the Roundhouse into a much-needed consolidated bus terminal for Greyhound and other carriers (notwithstanding recent developments on that front).
There would also be space for a rejuvenated Philadelphia City Museum or Chinatown community groups, a new pavilion on the current outdoor plaza area, an outdoor cafe facing Franklin Square across the street, and large residential towers over part of the parking lot.
The group suggested a slimmed-down, pedestrian-friendly Race Street, and like all the presenters, would remove concrete walls around the building that were not part of the original design.
“One of the key roles this site can fulfill is to help connect the vibrancy and activity of Chinatown with the wonderful cultural sites and institutions in the historic district,” DAG chair Eli Storch told the symposium audience. “What we’re looking to do is to bring as much activated program [as possible] out to the street. Our goal is to maintain an activated facade for the length of the block.”
Art studios and lots of glass
A team from Ian Smith Design Group would alter the look of the building by constructing a four-floor glass Grand Atrium over the plaza, with swooping design elements on the roof, installing glass walls on the first floor, and creating a green woodland area in the northwest corner.
There would be a bus depot in the parking lot and access to the nearby PATCO station and Chinatown SEPTA subway station via walkways under Race Street. Indoor elements would include a food court, a Remembrance Hall focusing on the building’s history, and, underground, former jail cells converted into glass-walled artist studios.
“The first goal is shifting the perception of this building within the community, so that people feel a pull to enter the space and feel safe doing so, rather than erase the negative history that happened within these walls,” architect Talcia Brown said. “Our next goal dedicates portions of the site as living memorials to the injustices sanctioned in the building, as a tool not to forget but to do better.”
The upper floors would have office space as well as studio and one-bedroom apartments meant for college students and people who work in the area.
Community land trust
The firm KieranTimberlake sketched out a plan for multiple types of housing, including apartments in the Roundhouse priced for low- and moderate-income residents. To keep them permanently affordable, it would be structured as a community land trust, which would own the land, sell units, and buy them back when residents leave.
The southern half of the block would be sold to a developer for construction of two mixed-use residential towers and several row homes on Cherry Street, and the designers also envision many more new homes on parking lots and other underdeveloped land to the south, west and northwest of the Roundhouse block.
They also favor removing the front plaza and steps, opening up the old underground detention level to the outdoors.
“By removing this grandiose entrance plaza and the stairs, we expose the lower level cell blocks and the outlines of the cells remain filled with soil and flora, framed by two asymmetrical ramps, creating an accessible path for all,” architect Jazz Graves said. “The intervention turns what has become a monument to oppression into a living space for reconciliation. The entrance sequence becomes a powerful and honest acknowledgement of the past.”
School and community hub
Carolina Pena of Parallel Architecture Studio described her team’s proposal for a school and community hub intended to reverse the site’s history of excluding the public.
Their plan calls for an auditorium for film screenings, neighborhood forums and cultural gatherings; wellness rooms for yoga, dance and counseling; a cultural gallery; and an outdoor plaza with an open-air stage for concerns, food markets and celebrations.
“The boundary between building and city dissolves,” Pena said. “The Roundhouse becomes porous, its architecture no longer holding people out but drawing them in an open heartbeat at the center of civic life. What was once a hard edge becomes shared ground and a place of beauty and belonging.”
Massive housing, with healthcare services and a museum
Designers from RVA Architecture presented a reimagined building and block that packs in healthcare, retail and residential spaces, as well as a new museum building focusing on the city’s many histories.
“The museum is not imagined as a museum for the history of the police department,” architect Modesto Bigas-Valedon said. “It is intended as a museum for the city of Philadelphia, where ambassadors for a city engage visitors, the community and members of our neighborhoods to capture these narratives. They would be presented in various media, whether in exhibits, sponsored talks, school tours of the museum or to nearby attractions, each time telling the stories of this city that have made it what it is today.”
A tall, 300-unit residential building with 390 parking spaces would rise on the southern portion of the site, with a mixture of affordable and market-rate units, and sustainability elements like an efficient water system modeled on similar buildings in the South Bronx.
Other parts of the project would offer assisted living spaces and ambulatory care services and serve as a “relief valve” for the city’s existing, overtaxed health programs, Bigas-Valedon said. Those elements were inspired by the Community Health and Literacy Center on South Broad Street.
A museum, research institute, and justice center
The final presentation was made by an interdisciplinary design team, dubbed SSPJ Design, that came together for the Roundhouse project. They include museum exhibit designers, and focused on exploring the building’s complicated history and symbolism.
They suggested creating a “mixed-use civic hub,” with a Museum of Citizen Rights, a Research Institute on Rights and Public Life that hosts scholars, and a Nonprofit Justice Center housing legal aid organizations. That third element echoes a development plan for 8th and Race streets that was canceled during the pandemic.
“We propose a public resource that presents the history and the realities of individual rights, how they were defined, how they’ve been secured, how they’ve been reaffirmed over time, and our responsibility in doing that, kind of generation after generation,” one of the team members said. “We also envision interpretive and educational spaces that immerse visitors in the history of the building and equip them with the vocabulary and the tools to turn rights into action.”
The team would also build a rooftop garden and cafe, and spaces for entertainment and open public access.
City’s intentions remain unclear
Paul Steinke, executive director of the Preservation Alliance, said it now remains to be seen how the city decides to proceed with redevelopment of the property.
“One of the reasons we did this today was to try to get the attention of the property owner, which is the city of Philadelphia,” he said at the start of the symposium.
Speakers noted that city officials conducted a months-long community engagement effort on the building’s future in 2022 and 2023, but their intentions remain unclear. The symposium sponsors tried “very, very hard” to get a city representative to attend the event, but at the last minute they declined the invitation, Steinke said.
“Clearly, the Parker administration, for whatever reason, is playing their cards very close to the vest with respect to this building,” he said. “So our continued advocacy here, today and beyond, will remain very, very important in saving the Roundhouse, because we don’t know what they’re going to do, and we don’t know if they know what they are going to do.”
In November, under pressure from Mayor Cherelle Parker’s administration, the Historical Commission shot down an effort to designate the building as historic and protect it from being torn down. Work is under way to get it into the National Register of Historic Places, which would not block demolition but would make a future preservation project eligible for state and federal historic tax credits.
Mayor Parker has repeatedly said she would love to see affordable housing on the site, but it’s not clear if she meant it should be “in” the Roundhouse, Steinke said. In March, planning director Jessie Lawrence said the building’s brutalist design “might present some complexities in repurposing” it, but the city wanted to “remain open to all opportunities.”
The Planning Department had previously said the city would sell the building in 2023, but it has yet to issue a promised request for proposals, or RFP, for potential buyers and developers. Spokesperson Bruce Bohi said on Friday that the city still plans to put out an RFP, but has not decided when.
The post 6 ideas to transform the historic Roundhouse building appeared first on Billy Penn at WHYY.
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