Video

Listening to Buildings

By 
May 27, 2026
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Preservation gives us the opportunity to uncover the individual characteristics and history of each building. Senior associate Kemba Braynon, AIA, NOMA, believes this “listening” is crucial.

Preservation gives us the opportunity to uncover the individual characteristics and history of each building. Senior associate Kemba Braynon, AIA, NOMA, believes this “listening” is crucial. In this video, she highlights the importance of paying close attention to buildings and reflects on the vital tie between preservation and sustainability, showing how principal emeritus Carl Elefante’s mantra “the greenest building is the one that’s already built” has become cemented in our ethos and in our work.

One powerful thing about buildings is that they hold memory and purpose. And I think that if we are to listen to a building, we are going to look into the history of what it was and what it meant to the community and use that to inform what it can be in the future.

At Quinn Evans, we believe that the greenest building is the building that’s already been built, and that preservation architecture is really the most sustainable approach to design. That means making use of existing buildings instead of designing a building from the ground up.

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