Adaptive reuse
Why the best buildings already exist.
Adaptive reuse
Why the best buildings already exist.
Stewart Brand posits in How Buildings Learn that buildings have six layers, each changing at a different pace: site (never), structure (thirty to three hundred years), skin (twenty years), services (seven to fifteen years), space plan (three years), and stuff (daily). Good design accounts for these different speeds. Bad design treats a building as an unchangeable object.
The consequence is that the best buildings are not the newest but the most adaptable. A nineteenth-century warehouse in Amsterdam that is now an office, was previously a pub, before that storage, and before that perhaps a home, has proven it can carry multiple lives. Each new life changed the building without destroying it. The structure remained; the content shifted.
Rem Koolhaas argues in Preservation Is Overtaking Us the counterpoint: not everything deserves preservation. The obsession with heritage can paralyze a city, block every development, make every change impossible. Koolhaas is right that blind conservatism is no answer. But adaptive reuse is not conservatism. It is recognizing that existing structures often offer more possibilities than new construction, at lower cost, with less environmental impact, and with a character that cannot be manufactured.
The Tate Modern in London, a former power station. The Westergasfabriek in Amsterdam, a former gas works complex. The Fondazione Prada in Milan, a former distillery. Each of these projects succeeded not despite the existing building but because of it. The scale, the texture, the irregularities, the history embedded in the walls, all of this provides a quality that no architect can create from nothing.
For how we build and renovate, this has a direct implication: look first at what already stands. Not with the eye of the wrecking ball but with the eye of possibility. The question is not what to tear down. The question is what else the building can become.
Sources: Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built (Penguin, 1994); Rem Koolhaas, Preservation Is Overtaking Us (GSAPP Books, 2014).
Source: Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn (Penguin, 1994); Rem Koolhaas, Preservation Is Overtaking Us (GSAPP Books, 2014)