For Immediate Release
Contact:
Patrick Fecher
publicrelations@emilydickinsonmuseum.org
EMILY DICKINSON MUSEUM EARNS PHIUS CERTIFICATION FOR RECENTLY CONSTRUCTED CARRIAGE HOUSE BUILDING
In collaboration with edmSTUDIO and Teagno Construction, inc., the Emily Dickinson Museum carriage house reconstruction has earned passive house certification. It is the first passive house historic reconstruction in the U.S.
(AMHERST, Mass., October, 9, 2025) – The Emily Dickinson Museum, edmSTUDIO, and Teagno Construction, Inc. have achieved passive house certification from PHIUS (Passive House Institute US) for the recently reconstructed carriage house building. The carriage house once stood to the east of The Evergreens, the home of Emily Dickinson’s brother Austin and his wife Susan. The exterior appearance of the carriage house is as faithful as possible in its design to evidence accumulated from historic maps, lithographs, and photographs. The interior layout mimics that of the historic carriage house while optimizing modern functions and flow.
At the outset of the design phase, museum staff worked with architects at edmSTUDIO to track down details of the original structure in historic maps, deeds, insurance documents, photographs, and archaeological reports. During the course of construction, museum staff discovered that the carriage house was most likely constructed at the same time as the Italianate portion of The Evergreens dwelling, built in 1856, rather than earlier as originally thought. In a photograph taken in about 1870, the carriage house appears as a prominent yet simple vernacular structure with window and door openings barely visible. Insurance maps from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries revealed that it was a wood frame structure with two levels and a metal roof. Wandering journalist Christopher Morley documented the structure in his 1936 travel memoir Streamlines. Details such as these gave the design team guidance about the exterior appearance and finishes.
Phius Certified Projects have had their designs and energy models approved by the Phius
Certification Staff, and have been inspected on-site by certified third-party quality assurance professionals trained by Phius to work on Phius projects. The rigorous Phius certification process ensures the building is designed and built to perform up to the targets determined by the climate-specific, cost-optimized Phius Standard.
“Achieving Phius Certification for a project is an accomplishment worth celebrating as it is representative of the hard work of the project team and shows that this project will be among the most efficient and comfortable buildings in the world,” James Ortega, Phius Project Certification Manager.
Architects Monica Del Rio Perez and Tim Widman of edmSTUDIO collaborated on a design using construction techniques and materials that will result in significant energy savings and eliminate reliance on fossil fuels for heating and cooling. The Museum engaged Teagno Construction, Inc., who recently worked on the second phase of Homestead restoration, as general contractor for the project.
“The recreation of the Emily Dickinson Carriage House re-establishes the historic fabric of the site, enabling a more complete interpretation of the poet’s life and surroundings for the Museum. The project was an opportunity to create a dialogue between the past and the future via historical reference and developing building science focused on sustainability. As a hub for visitor engagement, the reconstructed Carriage House invites guests to draw inspiration from its lived literary legacy, architectural presence, and renewed purpose to educate in both fields,” Tim Widman, Principal at edmSTUDIOS.
“Having worked through a number of historic restoration projects for the Emily Dickinson Museum, it was an exciting new challenge to take on a Passive Build at this incredible property. We rarely get to work on projects that have such significance both historically, and from an energy efficiency perspective. Being included in this process has been an absolute honor, and we would like to say thank you to Jane Wald and her wonderful staff, the design team, our Phius consultants, subcontractors, and Amherst College. It truly was a fun project,” David Tynan, General Manager of Teagno Construction, Inc.
The carriage house reconstruction project was supported by a major pledge from former Board members and long-time friends John and Elizabeth Armstrong. “We’ve always been proud of our association with the Museum, recognizing its importance to our regional community and now–through the wonders of technology–to the world.” stated Elizabeth, adding, “We’ve been drawn over the years to supporting singular projects that open multiple possibilities for the Museum. The carriage house is just such a project.”
Jane and Robert Keiter Family Executive Director Jane Wald says, “Opening the carriage house is a significant milestone in long-range goals for the Emily Dickinson Museum established more than twenty years ago. Much has happened between then and now thanks to the many supporters who have shared the Museum’s vision–and especially thanks to John and Elizabeth Armstrong who have been steadfast friends of the Museum since its establishment. By moving some functions into the carriage house, the Museum can more quickly complete the last phase of restoring Emily Dickinson’s Homestead so that her daily life and literary legacy can be more fully presented and appreciated in the place it was created. Moreover, we couldn’t be more pleased that this commitment to passive house construction and environmental responsibility reflects Dickinson’s regard for the natural world and the inspiration she drew from it.”
Archival photograph of The Evergreens and Carriage House (in middle ground of photo
For press-approved images: https://bit.ly/Press-Carriage-House
ABOUT THE EMILY DICKINSON MUSEUM
The Emily Dickinson Museum is dedicated to sparking the imagination by amplifying Emily Dickinson’s revolutionary poetic voice from the place she called home.
The Museum comprises two historic houses—the Dickinson Homestead and The Evergreens in the center of Amherst, Mass.—that were home to the poet (1830-1886) and members of her immediate family during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Museum was created in 2003 when the two houses merged under the ownership of the Trustees of Amherst College. The Museum is overseen by a separate Board of Governors and is responsible for raising its own operating, program, and capital funds.
ABOUT PHIUS
Phius is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting comfortable living for all and the well-being of the planet. This means driving down carbon emissions and working toward a net zero future. Phius works toward this goal by training and certifying professionals, maintaining the Phius climate-specific passive building standard, certifying and quality assuring passive buildings, certifying high performance building products and conducting research to advance high-performance building.
Adrien Broom is an award-winning photographer, set designer, and filmmaker based in NYC and Connecticut. Drawing upon her multidisciplinary background in animation, fine art, photography, and decorative arts, Broom creates intricate, handcrafted sets that transport viewers to fantastical realms, exploring the intersection of nature and fantasy. Broom meticulously constructs physical sets that invite viewers into tangible, imaginative worlds. Her practice spans gallery and museum exhibitions, commercial projects, private commissions, and conceptual portraiture—all unified by her consistent artistic vision and creative philosophy. Influenced by diverse artists from Gregory Crewdson and Jim Henson to John Singer Sargent and Shona Heath, Broom has developed a signature approach to creating extraordinary worlds both photographically and as installations. Her award-winning work has been exhibited at the Centro di Cultura Contemporanea (Florence), Hudson River Museum (Yonkers), Southern Vermont Arts Center, and Edward Hopper Museum (Nyack among others). In 2025, Broom will present solo exhibitions at the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art in Oklahoma and the Mark Twain Museum in Hartford, CT. Her touring exhibition, A Colorful Dream (2019-2026), exemplifies her commitment to inspiring wonder.
Ligia Bouton was born in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and currently divides her time between Massachusetts and New Mexico in the US. Her creative work combines sculpture and photography with performance and digital video to recreate appropriated narratives and research drawn from the history of science, literature, and other sources. Bouton’s recent projects have been shown at museums such as the Copenhagen Contemporary (Denmark), Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Guildhall Art Gallery (London, UK), Minneapolis Institute of Art, SITE Santa Fe, the New Mexico Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Art Alliance, Bellevue Arts Museum, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art. In 2016, Bouton’s work was featured in the exhibition, “Charlotte Great and Small,” celebrating the bicentenary of Charlotte Brontë’s birth at the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Yorkshire, England. Bouton’s video work has been shown at Art Claims Impulse in Berlin, in the Biennial of Contemporary Art, Nimes, France, and at the Temporary Art Center, Eindhoven, The Netherlands, as well as in The Female Avant Garde Festival in Prague. Reviews of this work have appeared in Art in America, Art Papers, The Art Newspaper, Art Ltd., and The New York Times. She is the recipient of a 2016 Creative Capital grant for the opera “Inheritance” which premiered at University of California, San Diego in 2018 and a 2020 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship for her project “25 Stars: A Temporary Monument for Henrietta Swan Leavitt”. Her work can be found in numerous public and private collections including Crystal Bridges Museum, the Albuquerque Museum, St. John’s College, and the Falconer Gallery at Grinnell College. Bouton is currently Professor of Art Studio at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts.
Matt Donovan is the author of four books and two chapbooks: We Are Not Where We Are (an erasure of Walden, co-authored with Jenny George, Bull City Press 2025), The Dug-Up Gun Museum (a collection of poems about guns and gun violence in America, BOA 2022), Missing Department (a collaborative collection of art and poetry created with artist Ligia Bouton, Visual Studies Workshop 2023), A Cloud of Unusual Size and Shape: Meditations on Ruin and Redemption (a book of lyric essays, Trinity University Press 2016), Rapture & the Big Bam (selected by Lia Purpura for the Snowbound Chapbook Competition, Tupelo Press 2016), and Vellum (selected by Mark Doty for the Bakeless Contest, Houghton Mifflin 2007). Donovan is the recipient of a Whiting Award, a Rome Prize in Literature, a Pushcart Prize, a Levis Reading Prize, and an NEA Fellowship in Literature. His work has appeared in numerous journals, including AGNI, American Poetry Review, The Believer, Kenyon Review, The New England Review, Poetry, Threepenny Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review. Donovan serves as Director of the Boutelle-Day Poetry Center at Smith College.
You are cordially invited to the Emily Dickinson Museum’s celebration of the poet’s 195th birthday! On Saturday, December 6, join us in person at the Homestead and The Evergreens for a free open house with tours, crafts, music, hot cider and gingerbread cookies! 
Introduced to the European market in the seventeenth-century, trade in tea – and subsequently in coffee and chocolate – became a means of establishing empires and generating the almost frantic consumerism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the West. Emily Dickinson and her family delighted in these exotic imported beverages and, like the rest of New England, acquired the requisite material goods to make and serve tea, coffee, and chocolate in their own family circle and for their guests. This talk will explore the meanings, settings, and equipment for “taking tea” in Emily Dickinson’s world, including original family objects now in the Museum’s collection.
Beginner and experienced poets of all ages are invited to come and use children’s book covers as diving boards into memory and imagination. Children’s books will be on hand to browse, and participants will also be encouraged to search online for their own current or past favorite children’s books. Using one or more of the five senses (sight, sound, touch, smell & taste), participants will generate drafts of new poems as the vivid literary landscape of rhymes, illustration, and stories of childhood spark memories and new ideas. 
In a time of ecological crisis and increased disconnection from nature, poets create vital space to honor and reflect upon the natural world, with its joys and its losses. In this generative workshop led by The WildStory Podcast host Ann E. Wallace and featured guest Elizabeth Sylvia, poetry and nature enthusiasts of all ages and experience levels are invited to slow down and open their senses to the natural world—the memories it holds, the meanings it carries, and the feelings it inspires. Participants will engage in writing exercises, learn new strategies, and compose a poem draft during the session.
Join us for a generative workshop that pairs the visual art form of collage with poetry! Participants will be guided through a process of discovery with different collaging materials and text to create their own hand-crafted collage. You will walk away with seeds of poems, deeper knowledge and experience with a visual art form, and a found poetry technique to help you — in the immortal words of Emily Dickinson — “tell all the truth but tell it slant “! All levels of experience with poetry and visual art are welcome.