Four Awards. Twenty-Five Years. One Unwavering Mission.
Union Brings Home Four 2025 CNU Charter Awards!
Westminster Street Revitalization
Award: 2025 CNU Charter Award: Block, Street and Building
Westminster Street embodies the journey of Providence, Rhode Island from decline to renaissance. This project transformed three architecturally significant but underutilized historic buildings—the Beaux Arts Lapham Building (1904), Art Deco Wit Building (1925), and Neo-Classical Trayne Building (1893)—into a vibrant mixed-use development with 55 apartments, office space, and ground-floor retail.
A new four-story addition to the Trayne Building, designed to complement the historic structure’s scale and proportion, helped frame the adjacent impromptu gathering space that evolved into Grants Block, an 8,000-square-foot urban park with cedar seating, landscaped beds, and a dog park. Together, they serve as catalysts for downtown’s continued renaissance.
Westminster Street Revitalization is featured in CNU Public Square: 🔗 Read here
Cape Cod Resiliency: Missing Middle
Award: 2025 CNU Charter Award in The Region: Metropolis, City and Town
This project addresses Cape Cod’s housing crisis through strategic infill development that preserves local character. Facing a median home value of $346,000 against a $70,400 median income, with 82% single-family homes and 36% seasonal properties, Cape Cod lacks workforce housing options. This $450,000 initiative partnered with five towns to document traditional housing types, engage communities through workshops, and create implementation plans.
Three demonstration projects are under construction, two towns adopted enabling codes, proving context-sensitive density can enhance rather than detract from community character.
Cape Cod Resiliency: Missing Middle is featured in CNU Public Square: 🔗 Read here
Eastdale Main Street Village
Award: 2025 CNU Charter Award: The Block, Street, and Building
Eastdale Main Street Village transforms 60 acres of greenfield into a vibrant, thoughtfully integrated community where life, work, and leisure are seamlessly intertwined.
The neigborhood’s distinct character balances over 400 residences with 120,000 square feet of commercial and medical office space. Its human-scale approach features generously wide sidewalks and inviting green spaces. Tree-lined walkable streets lead to a central green, playground, dog park, and creekside trails—fostering opportunities for spontaneous community interaction.
The developer’s innovative business ownership model drives lasting economic investment and stability while it nurtures authentic connections.
Eastdale Main Street Village is featured in CNU Public Square: 🔗 Read here
Preserving History: Assessments and Climate Adaptations at the House of the Seven Gables
Award: 2025 CNU Merit Award: The Block, Street, and Building
Union led a two-year long collaborative planning process with a multidisciplinary team, balancing stringent preservation requirements with critical climate adaptation needs. Efforts included facilitating workshops with staff, trustees, municipal officials, and community members to build consensus on priorities.
The outcome provides a guide for how to address the unique challenges and make resilient each of the historic structures projecting into 2100 as well as a phased masterplan vision for the campus.
The plan integrates preservation with climate resilience creating an opportunity for campus revisioning that will ultimately better serve the museum association’s initiatives and mend the fractured urban fabric for one of Salem’s most visited historic neighborhoods.
Preserving History: Assessments and Climate Adaptations at the House of the Seven Gables is featured in CNU Public Square: 🔗 Read here
The Congress for the New Urbanism Charter Awards recognize exemplary work by CNU members and their allies who design and build places people love. The winners not only embody and advance the principles of the Charter of the New Urbanism, they make a difference in people’s lives.
“Our quarter-century journey with the Congress for the New Urbanism has been one of constant inspiration, learning alongside an extraordinary community of practitioners who share our vision for human-scaled development and authentic placemaking. To have our work recognized among such outstanding projects from colleagues across the field leaves us both deeply honored and profoundly grateful.
These awards celebrate our core belief that great design transcends beautiful buildings—it’s about harnessing design’s inherent power to create stronger, more equitable communities. From addressing housing affordability on Cape Cod to protecting our most treasured historic places, each of these awarded projects embodies the principles of the Charter that have guided our work since day one.
Thank you to our incredible team, our visionary clients, and our community partners who make this work possible. Here’s to the next 25 years of designing places where people and communities can flourish!”
— all of us at UNION