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This in-person lecture is part of the Fall 2025 Sciame Lecture Series, "rePURPOSE."

Ruchika Modi: With a background spanning industrial design, economics, and journalism, Ruchika Modi brings a multifaceted understanding of the ways in which cities function to her architectural practice. Modi's experiences living and working in Mumbai (then Bombay), New Delhi, and San Francisco have also influenced her nuanced view of urban planning and design, inspiring her passion to find architectural solutions to a range of relevant issues, from sustainability to inequality. At PAU, Modi sets the firm's vision in partnership with Creative Director Vishaan Chakrabarti, including shaping the firm's diverse portfolio of projects and overseeing all aspects of the design process. Currently, Modi is leading the design team for the FAA's new sustainable airport traffic control tower prototype, which will be adapted to replace over 100 aging towers in regional and municipal airports across the nation. She is also project lead for Princeton University's newest residential college, Hobson College, as well as for the master plan. She spearheaded the design of the iconic Domino Sugar Refinery in Brooklyn, an adaptive reuse project transforming the historic nineteenth-century factory into offices with a mixed-use ground level, which opened in the fall of 2023. Modi holds a Master of Architecture degree from the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University, where she was awarded the Charles McKim Prize for Excellence in Design / Saul Kaplan Traveling Fellowship, the William Kinne Fellows Prize for Study and Travel Abroad, and the Lucille Smyser Lowenfish Memorial Prize. Modi received her BA in economics from the University of Delhi and a BA with distinction in interior architecture from the California College of Arts, San Francisco. Her work has been exhibited at the Center for Architecture in New York, the International Architecture Biennale in Rotterdam, and the China International Architectural Biennale in Beijing.

"Palimpsest | Repurposing a Sugar Refinery": The Domino Sugar Refinery on the Williamsburg waterfront—originally purpose-built for sugar production—is now repurposed as one of New York’s most ambitious adaptive reuse projects. The NYC landmark, a merger of three separate but conjoined industrial structures with small, misaligned windows, defied normative approaches to adaptive reuse. In this lecture, Ruchika Modi, AIA, Senior Principal at PAU, will unpack the transformation of the 19th-century factory into a contemporary workplace, event venue, and community hub. Described as a “bottle in a ship,” the design tucks a modern curtainwall building within the existing masonry in order to create level, wheelchair-friendly office floors bathed with ambient light. The gap between the two façades engenders a phenomenological experience while enabling daylight, biophilia, and interior views of the patinaed brick, resulting in a unique post-pandemic workspace of the future. Modi will explore the challenges of working within the complex historic structures and how these constraints inspired progressive solutions that marry sustainability, accessibility, and architectural integrity. More than a case study in design, the Refinery demonstrates how adaptive reuse can reinforce the palimpsest of the city, conserve embodied energy and narrative, and celebrate history by projecting it into the future.

Suggested Reading: The Theory of the Body is Already a Theory of Perception by Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

"rePURPOSE" centers on the practice of adaptive reuse in the built environment. Repurposing, embedded in historical patterns of city building and for the most part discarded in the modern movement, is undergoing a remarkable renaissance. The lecture series invites architects, planners, developers, advocates, and engineers to present the technologies, designs, economic incentives, and policy changes that are needed to advance a substantively renewed and at-scale program of repurposing in New York and other global cities. The reuse of old structures is not a new idea. After the fall of the Roman Empire, for example, the Colosseum was repurposed for housing and workshops during the medieval period. Although reuse is understood as a convention that both requires and imposes minimal impact, rePURPOSE shines light on how the methodology might not be entirely benign, how it might in fact have real impact, and the ways in which it challenges and would necessarily disrupt the very conventions with which we typically assume it is aligned.

Of special, although not exclusive, interest is unpacking the relationship of repurposing to the climate crisis. Might historic preservation sit at the center of technical innovation? Are all older buildings valuable as climate mitigation assets, or will new uses, such as data storage in old buildings, undermine the LCA embodied carbon savings achieved? What rules, laws, and incentives are needed to sustain innovative approaches to meaningful reuse, and to what extent will a complete reform of preservation regulations and zoning frameworks be required?

The Fall 2025 Sciame lecture series will address the profound potential inherent in giving new life to old structures; employing adaptive reuse methodologies to impact environmental, economic, and cultural conditions by reducing waste and carbon emissions, lowering costs and raising property values, maintaining historical character, and preserving local identity.

All lectures are free, open to the public, and held in the Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture Sciame Auditorium. For live captioning, ASL interpretation, or access requests, please contact  ssadean@ccny.cuny.edu " rel="noopener" target="_blank"> ssadean@ccny.cuny.edu .

This lecture series is made possible by the Spitzer Architecture Fund and the generous support of Frank Sciame ’74, CEO of Sciame Construction.

(Photograph ©Paul Raphaelson)