Stevens & Smith Center - Preserving the Past, Designing for What Comes Next

In downtown Lancaster, Pennsylvania, the transformation of the Thaddeus Stevens & Lydia Hamilton Smith Center for History and Democracy is about more than preserving a building. It is about creating a museum that can change with its community while remaining rooted in the history that made the site important. Tate raised access floor solution helped to maintain the beauty of the space while adding a functional element that is a core component to maintenance of the building. 

Thaddeus Stevens was a lawyer, congressman, and leading opponent of slavery who championed racial equality during the Civil War and Reconstruction. His Lancaster home and law office also played a role in the Underground Railroad.

Lydia Hamilton Smith, Stevens’s trusted confidante and longtime household manager, was also a successful businesswoman and property owner who achieved significant financial independence despite the barriers facing Black women in the nineteenth century.
Together, Stevens and Smith’s story reflects struggles for freedom, equality, and resilience. Their home became a place where private lives intersected with major political and social changes in American history.

The museum’s sixteen galleries combine historic preservation, innovative storytelling, immersive audio-visual experiences, and rigorous scholarship. Designed by Centerbrook Architects, the project integrates contemporary museum design, local craftsmanship, adaptable building systems, and flexible spaces that can evolve with changing exhibitions, technology, and visitor needs.

A Targeted Approach to Flexibility

Tate access flooring was used specifically in the Legacies of Reconstruction gallery. The exhibit explores the years after the Civil War, when Black Americans exercised hard-won rights by voting, holding public office, owning land, starting businesses and pursuing education. It traces the continuing struggle for civil rights in America and connects the legacy of Thaddeus Stevens to a broader story that continues today. Within this gallery, several significant pieces of furniture or display-related infrastructure are anchored into the floor system rather than simply placed on top of it. 

Russell Learned of Centerbrook Architects explains why an access floor was useful in this particular part of the museum: The system provides a secure means of anchoring selected elements while retaining the possibility of moving them if future exhibition requirements change. Tate access flooring consisting of panels and a pedestal system creates an accessible zone beneath the finished floor, allowing services and infrastructure to be reached and modified with less disruption than a conventional fixed installation.

Tate raised access flooring has evolved far beyond its mechanical origins, offering more than just a platform for design finishes. While modern materials like wood, porcelain, and terrazzo offer compelling aesthetic options, raised flooring also contributes to sustainability, energy efficiency, and spatial flexibility. Tate raised access flooring also provides flexible underfloor service distribution, improved energy efficiency, and maximized spatial design. It can conceal heavy data cabling, electrical wiring, and HVAC services underfoot, making equipment changes and moves simple.

In this particular gallery, that accessibility complements the exhibition design. If an exhibition changes, technology is updated or one of the anchored elements needs to be relocated, the floor system provides greater flexibility for making that adjustment.

The access flooring’s value is less about being visible than about keeping future options open. For a museum expected to serve visitors for decades, that can have practical and financial benefits. A space that can be modified without extensive demolition can reduce disruption, construction work and material waste when changes eventually become necessary. More broadly, the approach reflects a principle that runs through the project: preserve what matters, but do not assume that every aspect of a building has to remain fixed forever.

For Stevens and Smith, that philosophy matters because the project itself is part of a much larger transformation occurring in downtown Lancaster.

Learned describes how dramatically the area has changed since he first worked there as an architect in 2006. What was once a collection of vacant buildings and parking areas has evolved into an increasingly active downtown district with new restaurants, housing, hospitality and cultural destinations.

According to Learned, the project was intentionally focused on local materials, labor and subcontractors. Lancaster History also encouraged Benchmark Construction to use local interns from the Thaddeus Stevens College of Technology. Young interns worked on the project throughout construction, while the project’s site superintendent, Matt Oswold, was himself a graduate of the program.

“The pride in their work was great,” Learned says. The result was a project that was not simply constructed in Lancaster but, in an important sense, constructed by Lancaster.

That local connection extended throughout the project. Tate, headquartered in Red Lion, Pennsylvania, was among the Pennsylvania companies whose products became part of the finished building, reinforcing the larger effort to draw on regional expertise and resources.

The emphasis on local participation also reflects the larger mission behind the museum. Robin Sarratt, President and CEO, Lancaster History, describes how her team as being deeply committed to ensuring that the project was embraced by the community.

And that effort appears to have paid off. “We are very proud of the fact that it was not only embraced by the community, but built by the community,” Sarratt says.

The project’s story also includes an unexpected reminder that buildings must perform in the real world, not simply in drawings. During a major flood caused by a burst water pipe in an adjacent building, water entered an upstairs lobby, flowed through the adjacent space and found an entrance into the Stevens & Smith Center beneath the floor.

“It was a nightmare,” both Sarratt, and Learned recall. In theory, the wall should have provided a complete separation. In practice, water traveled through as though the wall were not there.

Having installed the raised access floor under this area and the magnetic Attiro plank hardwood allowed the flooring to be taken up and salvaged. This added advantage was indeed a benefit during this catastrophe and saved time and money. 

Attiro combines all of the beauty of engineered wood with all of the ease of an access flooring system. Representing a radical departure from the alternative factory-bonded systems, with a magnetized Attiro system a traditional-style wooden floor – a plus for an installation in a historic structure – can be created without compromising access to the underfloor void.

The experience demonstrated how even carefully designed building systems can encounter conditions that no one anticipated. It is also a reminder that successful long-term building performance depends on understanding how different systems interact in real-world conditions not simply how individual components perform in isolation.

Building With the Community

Lancaster History raised nearly $24 million for the project, according to Sarratt, and she notes that donors did not seek naming rights. Instead, there was an unusual emphasis on recognizing the collective effort behind the institution.

That philosophy extends beyond the people who funded the project. It includes architects, contractors, interns, craftspeople and manufacturers whose work is now embedded in the building.

While the Stevens and Smith Center was created to preserve history, it was not designed to freeze in time. For the museum, that makes the building itself part of the story. The Tate raised access floor solution allows for this change whether it be tomorrow or in 5 years. This flexibility maintains the dynamic nature of the space.  Visitors may notice the exhibitions, historic materials, mural and architecture first. The infrastructure supporting those experiences is largely invisible and that is part of its success. Its seven galleries, contemporary exhibition environments and carefully considered building systems allow the institution to look backward and forward at the same time. It preserves the past but leaves room for what comes next.