Located on a residential street in central Allentown, PA, the Lehigh Valley Heritage Center is a 30,000 SF museum celebrating the history, economy and people of the Lehigh Valley region of Pennsylvania.  The museum is located on the grounds of historic Trout Hall, the fishing lodge of William Allen, for whom Allentown is named.  The facility includes a library and reading room, archive storage, collection storage, meeting space, galleries, staff offices, education classrooms and exhibit galleries.

The site for the museum is a residential street comprised of two and three story brick townhouses.  The museum sits in a park setting, the centerpiece of which is historic Trout Hall, an 18^th century stone structure.  Instead of facing the residential street, the main entrance of the museum faces the park and Trout Hall.  RCG organized the building program to create two distinct but integrated masses:  a lower brick mass containing office and support functions wraps around a taller stone structure containing gallery, lobby atrium and other public spaces.  The lower  brick "wrapper" mediates between the residential scale of the street and the more monumental scale of the public portion of the museum.

Because the mission of the Lehigh Valley Heritage Center is to commemorate and tell the history of the region, RCG selected an exterior palette of regional materials.  The brick is a locally produced product and the copper cornices recall the industrial heritage of the Lehigh Valley region.  The larger mass containing the main entrance and the public spaces is clad with locally quarried Pennsylvania bluestone.

Visitors enter through a double height atrium, containing exhibits and visitor services.  The exhibit galleries are on the second floor, providing view to the park and Trout Hall.