Hot on the heels of being named winner of the 2023 AIA Architecture Firm Award, Seattle-based Mithun has been tapped by nonprofit The Industrial Commons (TIC) to helm the design and development of a community innovation campus for small-scale manufacturing in the city of Morganton, North Carolina. In early 2021, TIC purchased a 27-acre brownfield site in the city’s downtown that was formerly home to a Drexel Furniture factory. This past spring, the nonprofit received a $500,000 grant from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to remediate the blighted parcel.
Located 75 miles northwest of Charlotte in the heart of North Carolina’s Piedmont region, Morganton is a historic manufacturing center that over the past half century has seen both economic decline and diversification—the latter from an influx of Central American immigrants who arrived in the 1990s seeking work in area’s numerous poultry plants. Morganton-based TIC was founded in 2015 to rebuild a diverse working class in the South with a focus on founding and scaling employee-owned enterprises like the worker-led textile factory Opportunity Threads, creating industry networks, and offering workforce development and youth-training programs. In the years since, Morganton has garnered national recognition for its thriving worker co-ops.
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