The new Pullman Welcome Center is rooted in memory, transformation, and resilience. Inspired by the site’s complex history – once a vibrant public marketplace repeatedly gutted by fire- the reactivation embraces a tenacious community architecture as the site continues to be inhabited and preserved. The intervention aims to honor the site’s layered past while establishing a space that serves contemporary community needs: education, gathering, public history, and community. Rather than restoring the market hall to any one point in time as it stood previously, this interpretation evokes all its prior iterations through a timeless architectural language. It resists nostalgia while offering reverence, using abstraction and massing rather than mimicry to shape these memories while providing space for future public uses. The new architecture is at once deferential to the ruins as they stand while also monumental and itself iconic, establishing this evocative site as an important civic and cultural landmark for future generations. The concrete architecture of the new intervention contrasts with and draws from the remains of Beman’s Romanesque Revival form. It celebrates Pullman’s labor history, industrial heritage, and role in civil rights, while acknowledging cycles of erasure and renewal. Environmental and social sustainability guided the design, prioritizing integrating, preserving, and reactivating as much of the existing structures and the site’s existing column grid as possible. This is a civic and cultural project at its core, relying on the community’s need for a gathering space and education center to drive the programmatic priorities and arrangement.
Project Information
Project Type: Competition Entry
Size: 6,000 SF proposed renovation and addition
Team: Josh Mings, Katia Astudillo
