Bangor, Maine Architect
Commercial Architecture in Bangor
As a Maine Architect operating throughout the state of Maine, Bangor has served as a valuable location for growing its breadth of projects. Ervin Architecture designed the Maine Savings Amphitheater on the Bangor waterfront — a 16,289-seat outdoor venue and the largest assembly building north of Boston — and delivered it across multiple phases while the venue continued operating through every season. A later phase added 498 premium seats in ten suites across the east and west structures flanking the main bowl.
Downtown, EA rebuilt Blaze and Blaze Upstairs inside the 1869 Webster Treat block on West Market Square, a six-bay Italianate building empty since 2010. The original timber framing, load-bearing brick and tin ceilings stayed; bathrooms, kitchen, basement and wiring were replaced outright. Rasa Indian Cuisine on Exchange Street is 2,000 square feet and 75 seats, designed as a tenant-level adaptive reuse carrying a B to A-2 occupancy change. Urban Pizza is a 50-seat pizzeria EA converted from a laundromat.
Also by EA in Bangor: a 10,000 square foot gut renovation of a 19th-century brick warehouse across from Penobscot Plaza, and a 12,500 square foot medical office building on Ridgewood Drive planned as four tenant suites.
Adaptive Reuse in Downtown Bangor
Four of EA’s Bangor projects are adaptive reuse of buildings older than the codes they now have to meet.
Rasa required an occupancy change from B to A-2, which brings egress, fire separation, accessibility and mechanical requirements into a tenant space with no room to add any of them. The Penobscot Plaza warehouse needed a new elevator and new egress stairs, every original window replaced with Marvin direct glaze, the envelope waterproofed and the brick sealed for the first time in its life. Blaze took six months of stripping a century of patchwork out of the Webster Treat block before design work could proceed.
EA establishes that scope before design rather than after. On a lease deal it is the difference between a number that pencils and one that doesn’t.
Residential Architecture in and Around Bangor
EA takes residential work in Bangor and the surrounding towns, from new houses on lake and shoreland lots to renovations in the city’s older neighborhoods.
Built work nearby includes a lake house at Lucerne-in-Maine, an oceanfront home in Surry, and a 6,500 square foot modern house on Mount Desert Island. Further north, a contemporary lake house on Ambajejus Lake outside Millinocket, stepped into a hillside to fit between a 75-foot shoreland setback and a height ordinance.
Residential work answers to different terms than commercial. Habitation patterns, family dynamics, and what an owner wants to live in for thirty years. The constraints are just as hard; the brief is personal rather than financial.
Shoreland Zoning & Site Constraints
EA has designed on shoreland lots across the region — freshwater at Lucerne-in-Maine and Ambajejus Lake, saltwater in Surry and on Mount Desert Island near Acadia. Setbacks, vegetation standards and buffer requirements differ from town to town, and a lakefront parcel is regulated on different terms than a tidal one.
At Millinocket, the 75-foot setback from the high water mark, an ordinance height limit, and a hillside crowding the buildable area from behind left a narrow band to build in. The house steps back into the slope to occupy it, with a foundation engineered to hold the building up and the hillside back at once.
On the Ridgewood Drive medical office, the site is wooded and undeveloped with no municipal sewer, so parking, septic field, setbacks and building footprint all draw from the same fixed acreage. The site plan was solved before the floor plan was.
Permitting in Bangor & the Surrounding Towns
EA has permitted a 16,500-seat venue in phases on an active waterfront, an occupancy change in an occupied downtown block, and houses on shoreland lots in four different towns — each with its own code office, planning board and review committee operating on its own terms.
Snow load, freeze-thaw and water govern foundations, envelopes and roof geometry before anything else is decided. A scheme that ignores any of it is pleasant to present and expensive to permit, and EA finds those edges first.
