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Evening photograph of the Celebrezze Federal Building in downtown Cleveland

Celebrezze Federal Building Renovation

General Services Administration

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Industrial-style workspace for the University of Pennsylvania’s Facilities and Real Estate Services designed by MGA Partners, featuring exposed structure and red seating.

Facilities & Real Estate Services

University of Pennsylvania

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Interior hallway of the United States Courthouse in Camden, New Jersey, designed by MGA Partners, featuring marble floors, white columns, and natural light flooding through the windows.

United States Courthouse

Camden, New Jersey

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Related Projects

Area

14,000 sf

Certification

LEED

In the Media

New Deal Design Ambition, Preserved and Renewed, Society for Architectural Historians Building Tour 2022

Close-up of restored Guastavino-tiled ceiling vault with gold-toned tiles and modern circular lighting fixture.
Illustration of the structural and material conservation plan for the Joseph F. Weis Jr. Courthouse lobby.

Structural sounding defined a restoration program: tile cleaning, patching, casting replacements, grouting, mineral silicate coating, plaster repair, and a faux-travertine finish.

Construction team performing vault restoration inside the courthouse, repairing Guastavino tile.

MGA shaped the entrance and new lobby space for the Social Security Administration to feature the remaining original vaults, conserving and reconstructing the tiled vault and its ornamental trim.  

Restored lobby by MGA Partners of the Joseph F. Weis Jr. Courthouse featuring Guastavino-tiled vaults.
Historic stone façade of the Joseph F. Weis Jr. U.S. Courthouse, originally built in the 1920s and restored by MGA Partners.

Joseph Weis Jr. U.S. Courthouse Masterplan and Lobby Renovation
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Commissioned during a surge of massive federal projects nationwide in the 1920s and personally championed by Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, Pittsburgh’s new US Post Office was designed to house also all federal offices and courts for the city.  Decades later, the postal operations were transferred, and portions of the building remained unoccupied. MGA Partners was commissioned to study reuse of various spaces for five federal agencies.  The firm designed and completed the initial phase—sensitively inserting a new entrance vestibule, grand stair and elevator into an abandoned lobby, and carefully restoring a Guastavino-tiled vault, which was significantly damaged by prior renovations.

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