The Preble Street Resource Center was awarded the 2006 AIA Maine Design Excellence Award. The project was selected from over 40 submissions. Preble Street was designed in collaboration with James Sterling Architect. The jurors included Peter Bohlin, Brigitte Shim, and Cliff Gayley. The jurors, as noted by the AIA Maine press release, cited "its honesty, intelligence, and restraint in transforming a downtown street corner into an outdoor civic space that benefits users of the building and the neighborhood. It is an exceptional urban response to a challenging program using modest means. The project creatively reuses existing structures and incorporates such details as the bright colored lanterns to create a sense of welcome and presence. After their deliberations, the jury visited the site to find it animated by people congregating in the plaza on a late winter afternoon."
Portland Magazine recently wrote about the project saying, “the site used to be a parking lot. Now it’s a wonderful, humanized space, and it works. It dares to be different. Instead of institutionally being deployed at right angles, the benches are long strips of check plate steel dropped at seeming random, like pick-up sticks. it’s brilliant. It’s a beautiful little solar pocket, and MRLD discovered it and gave it to the people. You see people there all day long.”
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