National Trust for Historic Preservation honors Lubert-Adler’s Battery project

Lubert-Adler’s transformation of a derelict power station into a multipurpose development known as The Battery has won a major award from the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

In the announcement Tuesday, the trust described the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation National Preservation Award as an honor meant to reward “the best of the best” preservation projects across the country. The Battery is the first project in Philadelphia to receive the honor.

It was selected by a panel of expert jurors, who were struck by the repurposing of a long-shuttered Peco plant into a mix of apartments, office, hotel, and recreation space.

“As someone who looks at countless applications, I can tell you that the sheer scale and scope of the project was so impressive to us and the jurors,” said Catherine Killough, manager of grants and awards for the National Trust.

“This was a former electrical plant that polluted the area and has been reborn into this multiuse building that serves the community, houses people, and revitalizes the local economy,” Killough said. “It hits all the marks.”

Locally based Strada Architecture masterminded the project for Lubert-Adler, and their principal, Christopher Kenney, accepted the award at the National Trust’s PastForward conference in Milwaukee on Tuesday.

The ambitious project had already won local recognition, including from the CoStar Group and Philadelphia Business Journal, and praise from Inquirer architecture critic Inga Saffron.

“At The Battery, a stunning Beaux-Arts structure that resembles a grand train station, Strada carved apartments into what were once giant coal storage bins and boiler houses,” Saffron wrote in 2023. “They arranged living rooms around oddly placed columns, incorporated catwalks into the double-height spaces, and sneaked light into windowless bedrooms.”

The 130 apartments are 98% leased, according to Lubert-Adler, and last week an indoor sports facility called Ballers officially opened to the public. The complex also includes the 62-room Rivers Casino hotel, a separate 45-room hotel, office space, and an events space and commissary.

That’s quite a change from when developers began working in the graffiti-scarred building in 2018.

“The Battery was a monumental project for us … you have to be a little bit nuts to undertake it,” said Leonard Klehr, vice chair of Lubert-Adler. “Dean [Adler] was really the visionary in this, who could see what it could become without necessarily focusing on how difficult it would be to get there.”

Adler, Klehr, and other members of the development team took inspiration from earlier power plant redevelopments, such as the Battersea Power Station and the former Bankside Power Station that now houses the Tate Modern museum in London.

Klehr noted that a vast team of professionals worked on the project for years, with the majority of the redevelopment taking place during the COVID-19 pandemic. The national architecture firm Gensler did some preliminary work, but Strada led the project.

In an interview, Christopher Kenney of Strada Architecture highlighted the essential role that Historic Preservation Tax Credits played in the redevelopment. The almost $154 million project wouldn’t have been possible without that kind of incentive.

“The National Trust award highlights what a win-win the tax credit program is for developers and preservationists,” Kenney said. “This building had been derelict since 2008, and through that program, we were able to adaptively reuse it and forever rescue this beautiful, neoclassical structure.”

Construction on the original building began in 1917, a period when electric power was being introduced as a mass consumer good and corporations providing it wanted to use their infrastructure to make the argument that they were good civic actors.

That’s why they paid top architects like John T. Windrim, who designed this power plant, to help them build gorgeous structures to house their infrastructure. Windrim is also known for his work on the Franklin Institute and the Family Court building.

“It’s not in any sense a building that was intended for human habitation,” Kenney said. “It was really a machine, and the whole site was really part of the machine.”

Huge conduits used to draw water into the building to be converted into steam, and at the top soaring, rusted stacks stood against the sky. When Lubert-Adler began redeveloping the building, there was only 129,000 square feet of usable floor area inside.

Now the beaux-arts structure sports 544,000 square feet, as the design team added floors to the building in a historically sensitive way — not visible from the street — for apartments and offices.

“When we first went into the building, not only was it cold and dark and full of graffiti and generally kind of a scary, decaying place, but there were actually fish swimming around in the bottom of the turbine hall because of the connection to the Delaware River,” Kenney said.

“So it wasn’t just keeping the rain out, it was keeping the river out. It was really a huge undertaking.”