The timing couldn’t be more urgent. As Lang notes, 80% of the buildings projected to exist in 2050, the year of the UN’s net zero carbon emissions target, have already been built. The critical onus on architects and developers, therefore, is to retrofit, reuse and reimagine our existing building stock, making use of the “embodied carbon” that has already been expended, rather than contributing to escalating emissions with further demolition and new construction. — The Guardian
Tonkin Liu’s Stephen Lawrence Prize-winning Water Tower project is cited as one of many examples of the growing influence of adaptive reuse in the market as evangelized in Ruth Lang’s new book Building for Change, which is due out in September from the German publisher Gestalten. In a follow-up to his influential op-ed from January 2020, Wainwright takes up the cause for adaptive reuse via the disputed Marks & Spencer department store demolition, turning to last year’s Pritzker Prize winners for validation of an idea which has rapidly gained popularity across the UK.
“Demolishing is a decision of easiness and short-term. It is a waste of many things — a waste of energy, a waste of material and a waste of history,” Anne Lacaton told The Guardian critic. “Moreover, it has a very negative social impact. For us, it is an act of violence.”
2 Comments
Adaptive Reuse is thrown around in many of these articles as though all one has to do is minor interior work, but there are also highly involved and long-term wasteful examples as well...where the costs, material, shoring, and selective demolition is beyond and more deleterious than that of a new construction approach. Not saying that Adaptive reuse is always this, but that there is a spectrum, and such blanket statements have the same effect as the green-washing of the last many years, where a lack of critical review of the use of the terms leads to it's eventual meaninglessness.
Adaptive reuse is another thing not really taught in US arch. schools.
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