The Phoenix is a small building with a significant history for Mount Holyoke College as the former home of the nation’s first all-women's fire brigade, formed in the late 1800s as part of the physical education curriculum. After serving the women’s fire brigade, the building was home to the South Hadley Fire Department and most recently the studio of a sculpture professor before his retirement in 2018. Following his retirement, the building lay abandoned, and the college was deliberating whether to demolish or renovate. Aligned with Mount Holyoke's ambitious sustainability goal to be a net-zero campus by 2037, this project became a case study for an adaptive reuse/renovation project on the historic campus. The project team is a collaboration with C & H Architects, a local architecture firm. Six undergraduate liberal arts architectural studies students contributed as part of the design team. The students chosen were all students who would still be on campus during construction in 2024-25 and have the possibility to follow the construction process and see the project through to completion.

The goals of the project were to maintain the historic character of the building and its reading as a former fire station while aligning the project with campus sustainability goals for net-zero operational energy and low embodied carbon and making the building accessible. In keeping with my philosophy that less is more, many features were kept, including the original ceiling in the truck bay, the circular window in the gable of the firehouse, and the locations of the kitchenette and bathroom. Old doors in storage in facilities were incorporated for their historic character, and the floor in the truck bay was raised to be flush with and match the existing floor. The biggest changes were to increase the window size to bring in ample daylight, to close off the garage door while still maintaining its appearance on the exterior, and to open up the ceiling in the firehouse. Embodied carbon analysis and visualizations were an integral part of the design process, aiding in the decisions made to keep the existing cedar siding and vault the ceiling.

The decision to approach this project as an adaptive reuse resulted in a project with only ~25% of the embodied carbon that would have been emitted had we chosen to build new the exact same project.