Building Stewardship

The Building Stewardship team studies what keeps buildings standing, serviceable, and culturally legible across decades. The research focuses on the practices that extend a building's useful life rather than replace it: durability engineering, routine and deep maintenance, facade preservation, retrofit economics, and the institutional record required to coordinate work across ownership transitions.

We ground our work in real stewardship engagements. Our founding case study, the Woolworth Building, documents what a decade of facade restoration on a National Historic Landmark actually demands — and what the resulting institutional record looks like.

The team publishes for the architects, engineers, owners, and operators responsible for the long life of buildings, and for the regulators and academics shaping the frameworks they work within.