California Reimagined: Introducing Adaptive Reuse and Repositioning (Series Part 1)

Andrea Bono is a building enclosure consultant specializing in designing, investigating, and rehabilitating commercial, health care, educational, civic, hospitality, residential, and Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) buildings. Her projects include the adaptive reuse of a manufacturing facility listed on the National Register of Historic Places, which was converted into a LEED Silver-certified office space. Andrea also worked on the renovation and conversion of historical buildings to a LEED Gold-certified archaeology center. She completed the Sustainable Design Professional Program at UC Berkeley and is a LEED Accredited Professional. She applies her diverse expertise, experience, and education to design high-performance buildings, advocate for sustainable strategies, and guide projects to certified performance. Andrea serves as SGH’s Corporate Environmental Stewardship Champion and is an active member of the AIA San Francisco Committee on the Environment (COTE) and her local school district’s Sustainability Advisory Committee. Andrea also volunteers for Rebuilding Together, a national non-profit that provides safe and healthy housing.

Karin Liljegren has dedicated her career to community building, sustainability, and advocacy by embracing adaptive reuse as a powerful means to revitalize our cities. For over 24 years, Karin has focused on adaptive reuse projects and advocates for policy reform to make the repurposing of older buildings more financially viable and cornerstones of their communities. For Karin, adaptive reuse represents the potential to solve four challenges: address the housing shortage, combat climate change, preserve cultural heritage, and tackle the oversupply of vacant office buildings. Karin founded the architecture and interior design firm Omgivning in 2009. Today, she and her staff have touched over 500 buildings, drawing on a rich existing landscape to create programmatically and technically complex hotels, multifamily housing, restaurants, bars, creative offices, and theaters, often with custom furniture to match. Karin is a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects and active with the AIA Los Angeles Chapter. Through Urban Land Institute, she serves on the National Redevelopment and Reuse Council and the Local Innovation and Housing Councils. Karin also sits on the board of the Los Angeles Conservancy and chairs the Advocacy Committee and is involved with advocacy organizations such as the Central City Association as an adaptive reuse leader.

Nate Wittasek is a fire protection engineer whose work blends building science, performance-based design, and code strategy to solve complex challenges in both new construction and existing buildings. His background spans academia, the fire service, failure analysis, hazardous materials, and fire life safety for a wide range of occupancies in North America, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. In addition to large commercial, institutional, and cultural projects, Nate has significant experience with rehabilitation, historic structures, and adaptive reuse, where legacy conditions, aging systems, and evolving codes intersect. He helps project teams navigate these constraints with a practical, science-based approach that clarifies risk, aligns design intent with regulatory requirements, and supports creative solutions when prescriptive paths fall short. Nate’s practice covers fire life safety systems, code compliance, performance-based engineering, resiliency design, and accessibility consulting for academic campuses, assembly and performance venues, laboratories, multi-family dwellings, tall buildings, and critical infrastructure. His work is grounded in a commitment to modernizing buildings safely and pragmatically while supporting the design vision and long-term use of each project.