This Historic New England Welcome Center occupies the first floor of the historic Burgess Building in Haverhill, MA. The building, and its twin concrete warehouse, the Lang Building, are home to Historic New England’s headquarters, where they oversee the management of their collection of museums, historic properties, and historic artifacts.

The Welcome Center occupies the front third of the 12,000 sf first floor and serves as a place for public engagement. Despite the remarkable scholarship and collection housed above, the buildings lacked a public-facing space before this project. The center features a climate-controlled central vitrine to showcase the institution’s vast collection of historic artifacts, as well as gallery space surrounding it for the curation of supporting information and exhibits. The Center’s flagship exhibition “shoe stories” focuses on the legacy and influence of New England’s rich shoe-making tradition. The welcome center also includes a full-wall digital display to showcase the breadth of the institution’s historic properties located throughout New England, using photography, video, and digital scanning to unite the entirety of the organization’s collection under one roof.

The remainder of the first floor is configured as a flexible assembly space. Part black-box theater, part town hall, and part conference center, the flexible space can support’s HNE’s wide variety of voices as thought leader in the expanding and diverse world of historic preservation.