Good Bones — Why the Best Return Is in the Building Already Standing

Adaptive Reuse as an Investment Strategy: How to judge when an existing building beats new construction on cost, timeline and value

Kevin Kennon has spent 40 years putting buildings up and taking old ones apart, including the conversion of the American Express Building in Tribeca and the rebuild of Macy's Herald Square. Most developers price a site as if the structure on it were a cost to clear, when the frame, floors and shell are often the most valuable thing in the deal. He walks through how he reads an existing building for what it can carry, where reuse beats new construction on cost and timeline, and where it does not. Listeners leave able to look at an older property and tell whether the return sits in the land or in what is already standing.

About Kevin Kennon

Kevin Kennon, podcast guest

Award-Winning Architect and Sustainable Design Visionary

40+ Years of architectural practice40+ Design awards20+ Iconic buildings1.5M sq ft Barclays North American Headquarters

Kevin Kennon is an internationally renowned architect with more than 40 years of experience designing landmark cultural, commercial, and hospitality projects around the world. Known for combining design ambition with deep human insight, he brings a humanity-first philosophy to architecture — creating spaces that do more than impress visually; they shape how people feel, connect, recover, and remember an experience.

As Founder and CEO of Beyond Zero DDC Inc., Kevin is leading the development of a new model of luxury hospitality: zero-carbon wilderness resorts designed around intimacy, wellbeing, adventure, and safety. Rather than treating sustainability as a marketing layer, Kevin approaches it as a natural consequence of building responsibly in remote environments — while placing the guest experience at the center of every design decision.

His portfolio includes the 1.5 million square foot Barclays North American Headquarters, the Rodin Museum in Seoul, multiple award-winning Bloomingdale’s stores, and leadership of United Architects, a finalist in the World Trade Center design competition. His work has been featured in the permanent collection of MoMA, New York, and he has received more than 40 international design awards.

Kevin’s expertise spans architecture, adaptive reuse, urban development, hospitality design, and high-level real estate advisory.

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