For much of the 20th century, Philadelphia drew electricity from the Delaware Generating Station, a coal-fired power plant on the banks of the Delaware River. The Beaux-Arts giant went partially dark in 1969 and was fully decommissioned in 2008, leaving behind a steel-and-concrete shell weathered by decades of neglect.

      When architect Christopher Kenney ’82 first toured the station in 2017, nature had already begun to reclaim it. Trees sprouted from the roof. Fish swam through the turbine hall, where train tunnel-sized conduits opened to the river.

      Kenney, a principal at the Philadelphia design firm Strada, had been hired to help transform the ruins into The Battery, a mixed-use complex with two hotels, apartments, an event venue, and a high-end fitness club.

      “It was the opportunity of a lifetime,” Kenney says.

      It was also a puzzle of unusual complexity. “The whole site was really a giant machine,” he explains. “It was not intended for people. You walked around inside on catwalks and rickety stairs and rusted ladders. But there weren’t really many floors as such.”

      The original plant covered 128,000 square feet. By the time The Battery opened in 2024, it had grown to 544,000—a feat of design and engineering that added new life while preserving the building’s historic fabric.

      After the machinery was removed, Kenney’s team digitally scanned the structure and began planning for its adaptive reuse. With years of preservation experience, he understood the challenge of aligning a developer’s ambitions with federal regulations.

      The developer wanted habitable space and the National Park Service (NPS), the plant’s steward, insisted on protecting its configuration. “It was a technical challenge of how to add floors while making them invisible from the exterior, which is a neat trick of construction,” Kenney says.

      Eventually, the NPS accepted the plan Kenney and the structural engineer devised to control sightlines and avoid distracting from the building’s historic character. “Usually the park service will let you build one story tops, and we were able to convince them that we could get two stories up there and it wouldn’t trash the place—to use the technical term,” Kenney adds with a laugh. “Evidently, we were successful enough that people like it.”

      In 2025, the National Trust for Historic Preservation gave The Battery a National Preservation Award, recognizing the project as a landmark achievement in adaptive reuse. It was a career-defining moment for Kenney, whose love of making things traces back to his earliest days.

      Growing up in North Haven, Connecticut, Kenney spent endless hours building with Legos. “Never underestimate Legos,” he says. His father taught him to use power tools, and weekends found him in the basement woodshop, emerging at dinner covered in sawdust with a new creation.

      At Taft, he forged lifelong friendships and found mentors who shaped his growth. John Small, the legendary Latin teacher and cross-country coach, left a lasting impression. “I still think of things he said to me and the ways he helped me feel seen as a person,” Kenney says.

      He studied religion at Colgate University and earned a master’s at Harvard Divinity School. Though he briefly considered academia, he worked as a carpenter and construction manager during college and never lost his attachment to building.

      The Battery may be the project of a lifetime, but Kenney isn’t worried about topping it. “That’s one of those things that’s great about architecture—the longer you practice, the more you learn,” he says.

      One of his current projects is an addition to a high school that unites three centuries of construction. He’s designing a new STEM center with an atrium featuring a Foucault Pendulum—a device that hangs from an oculus and tracks Earth’s rotation.

      “You know, it’s not a power plant,” Kenney says. “But it’s pretty great.”