There’s nobody in town who’s done as much — or as well — at designing the rehabilitation of old buildings in Pittsburgh as Strada, a medium-size Downtown architectural firm.

The firm has successfully planned some of the city’s highest-profile renovations in recent years — such as transforming the old Reed Smith office building at Sixth Avenue and William Penn Place into the elegant new Hotel Monaco, restoring the historic interior of the 1871 Dollar Savings Bank on Fourth Avenue, and converting vacant floors in the old Nabisco factory on Penn Avenue in East Liberty into the new Google offices at Bakery Square.

Strada also has taken on critically important design work for the current restoration and rehabilitation of yet another Pittsburgh landmark — the 30-story, 1953 Alcoa Building, a classic mid-century modern building that is known for its architecture the world over. This Downtown building is becoming a mixed-use office and apartment building with 12 floors of office space and 240 new residential apartments.

Strada also is working on turning the former Salvation Army headquarters building at the corner of Grant Street and the Boulevard of the Allies into a boutique hotel. This 10-story red-brick building with Gothic Revival touches once housed the Evangeline Residence for Young Women as well as other Salvation Army facilities. And it is finalizing the plans for turning the old Federal Reserve Branch Bank on Grant Street into — you guessed it — another boutique hotel.

To John Martine, one of Strada’s founding partners, this is all about “solving people’s problems.” The architectural philosophy is very basic: “We want to create spaces that people want to be in, whether it is a public space or a private office or apartment,” Martine says.

Martine and three others founded Strada — which means “street” in Italian — 15 years ago.

“We wanted something in our name that suggested an urban environment, where buildings meet the street and people are,” Martine says.

The firm has eight principal architects and 40 employees total, including eight in a new office in Philadelphia. Like many firms today, Strada has brought a number of design specialties into one office — employing landscape architects, urban planners, interior designers, graphics designers and, in Strada’s case, even exhibit specialists. (The firm it acquired in Philadelphia designed the Liberty Bell exhibit on Independence Mall in Philadelphia.)

Strada does not limit its practice to restoring old buildings, of course, and has done a great amount of totally new work here and in other cities. But it is the work with older buildings, and its ability to combine modern-looking facilities with historic structures, that most captures the eye.

One striking recent project by the firm is in downtown Wheeling, W.Va., where Strada used a mix of judicious demolition, new construction, and outstanding exterior courtyard design, to unify and improve the diocesan campus around St. Joseph’s Cathedral — the seat of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Wheeling and Charleston.

There, the closing of an 1896 former parochial school opened up an opportunity to create new offices for the diocese. A deft modern addition that carries out the key lines of the old school, while still being an aggressively modern steel and glass building, provided an entrance for the new offices. At the same time, the addition helped enclose what Strada conceived as a quiet, contemplative courtyard next to the 1926 neo-Romanesque cathedral. The cathedral, incidentally, was designed by Pittsburgh architect Edward Weber in the same year he did Pittsburgh’s Central Catholic High School in Oakland.

At the Hotel Monaco — a 1903 structure that was originally the headquarters of Duquesne Light Co. and later the offices of the Reed, Smith law firm — the entire older building was brought back to life as an approximately 250-guest room hotel. Ballrooms were situated on either side of the original two-story lobby where twin colonnades and a classic coffered ceiling were restored. Additionally, a great deal of restoration to the original restrained classic facade was undertaken.

“All of these projects are different, and that’s part of the excitement,” Martine says.

Martine, 76, a Pittsburgh native who studied architecture in the late 1950s and early ’60s at the University of Notre Dame, has no thoughts of retiring. He returned to Pittsburgh in 1969 and was in private practice from 1973 to ’86 before forming a partnership called Integrated Architectural Services. This was succeeded with the formation of Strada 14 years later in 2000. He has just stepped down after serving as chairman of a statewide historic preservation group, Preservation Pennsylvania.

John Conti is a former news reporter who has written extensively over the years about architecture, planning and historic-preservation issues.

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