An exciting development is occurring near the corner of Massachusetts and College Avenues. Indianapolis Professional Firefighters Local Union 416 is expanding its headquarters there and consolidating its campus to better serve both its membership of over 2000 active and retired firefighters, and its neighborhood. 30 years ago, the Firefighters purchased and restored the abandoned 1872 Fire Station No.2, establishing their union hall on a then-struggling Massachusetts Avenue. Mass Ave is now prospering as a Cultural District, and restored Station No. 2’s Fire Museum, Survive Alive program, and community-shared meeting rooms and green-spaces have been a catalyst towards that revival.

storrow|kinsella developed this plan for managing and developing the 16-mile long Wabash River Scenic Byway through Tippecanoe County Indiana.

Historic Preservation and Cultural Resource consulting is sometimes dismissed as an honorable though not particularly cutting-edge undertaking for a design-based studio such as ours. We think otherwise. Public landscapes and spaces are ephemeral either through inattention, succumbing to competing spatial/economic pressures or mismanagement (and yes, design has a hand in that as well…not everything old is good, and in contemporary terms, much of the new is mediocre if not bad). Public spaces need constant attention and periodic renovation/renewal. And too many design plans either don’t survive the political and funding cycles of public work, or are implemented as cost-constrained phased work that may or may not accrue critical mass impact, in the sense of an intended inter-relatedness of systems. Too visionary on the client or designer side? Maybe, but think Olmsted,  Burnham or Kessler and the lasting values of their visions!But also think of the sometimes wayward/sometimes brilliant  ’60s (now historic) and the current challenge in seeing past the aging trendiness of that period to value the mid-century modern masterpieces it generated and that are being revisited today.  We had the pleasure of guiding the National Register process for modernist work in Columbus, Indiana, and it has been rewarding to see […]