Power: Reviving a Historic Building The Todd Bolender Center for Dance & Creativity

The relocation of Kansas City Ballet (KCB) involved careful preservation and adaptive reuse of the 52,000-square-foot historic Power House at Kansas City's Union Station, a former coal-burning plant designed by Jarvis Hunt and completed in 1914. Listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 2004, the building sat abandoned from the 1970s until 2006. Rehabilitation of the building, adhering to The Secretary of the Interior's Standards for the Treatment of Historic Properties, included reinforcement to the building's structural elements, replacement of concrete, a new roof, and major repairs to masonry, terra cotta detailing and fenestration.

In the year following its grand opening, the building was recognized with more than a dozen awards for excellence in design and preservation, including a prestigious National Preservation Honor Award from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, a National Honor Award from the American Institute of Architects, and the Project of the Year Award from the International Concrete Restoration Institute.

Power chronicles the award-winning preservation and transformation of this historic facility, outlining the many constraints and opportunities the project team met along the way.