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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... View full entry
Through the doldrums of America’s pandemic-triggered office downturn, the nation’s capital is quickly turning into a case study for the conversion of former commercial spaces into residential housing and mixed-use development. The Washingtonian magazine recently did a survey of different... View full entry
New York City Mayor Eric Adams has announced a new adaptive reuse task force that will explore the vast untapped potential for rehabilitation present in the city’s considerable stock of outdated office buildings. Born out of the new Local Law 43, the task force is charged with producing... View full entry
New photos of the recently-opened Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture in Riverside, California, have just been published, showcasing the Page & Turnbull-led transformation from an outdated New Formalist public library building into an important home for Chicano art. Named for actor... View full entry
Adaptive reuse continues to be a powerful tool used to save, preserve, and reform older buildings. In Tarragona, Spain, Josep Ferrando Architecture collaborated with Gallego Arquitectura to transform the former Reus prison into the El Roser Social Centre. In November 2021, Archinect reported... View full entry
Foster + Partners has completed work on Ombú, an adaptive reuse project in Madrid, Spain. The scheme, designed for Spanish infrastructure and energy company ACCIONA, sees the retrofit of a 1905 gas plant into an office building. Over 10,000 square meters (108,000 square feet) of office space are... View full entry
A Boston development that’s billed as New England’s first LGBTQ-friendly senior affordable housing project broke ground Friday. The Pryde will convert the former William Barton Rogers Middle School in Boston’s Hyde Park neighborhood into 74 units of mixed-income housing for seniors. — NBC Boston
The project is being led by developer Pennrose and local nonprofit LGBTQ Senior Housing, Inc. Boston-based architecture firm DiMella Shaffer carried out the facility’s design. The development will maintain the original 1899 building, which has been vacant since 2015, and its two additions... View full entry
It's fascinating to document how architectural and cultural trends are deployed across the country, but we've seen that widespread disinvestment — as well as patterns of renovation and repurposing — add to an already palpable sense of impermanence. — NPR
Chicagoans Zach Huelsing and Jon Lehman’s Rural Indexing Project was first launched during the Obama administration and has grown to an archive of more than 1,200 locations spread across 25 different states. Huelsing and Lehman both studied architecture and urban planning respectively, and their... View full entry
Malls represent heavy investments in infrastructure, construction materials and place making that should not be discarded. The popularity of dead malls as sites for Covid testing and eventually vaccinations underlines these essential qualities: Easy road access, unencumbered indoor space, instant name recognition. Contemplating the mall’s roots in the garden is an opportunity not for picturesque nostalgia but for new solutions. — The New York Times
The author of the forthcoming title Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall, out next week from Bloomsbury, Lange crafts a nice rundown of dead mall spaces’ possible reuses as public gardens, apartment complexes, and even health care centers in a country where... View full entry
This site, where an old building is being transformed into a charter school, has just distinguished itself from the 40,000 other major construction projects in New York City by having its third worker fatality in less than three years.
No other construction site in New York City has had this many separate fatal incidents since at least 2003, when the Department of Buildings began keeping electronic records. But despite the pattern of deaths, the consequences have been negligible.
— The New York Times
In full view of the Major Deegan Expressway, 20 Bruckner Boulevard, known throughout the New York area as the site of the iconic former History Channel (and later iHeartRadio) billboard, was once the ice storehouse of a former Yankees owner and is now being transformed into a charter school by... View full entry
A Texas-based, non-profit by the name of Transform 1012 N. Main Street (Transform 1012) has announced the purchase of a former Ku Klux Klan auditorium in Fort Worth, Texas. It will be converted into The Fred Rouse Center for Arts and Community Healing, a new cultural hub and space for... View full entry
David Chipperfield Architects is celebrating the recent completion of their Morland Mixité Capitale project in Paris following six years of construction on a ‘Reinventing Paris’ scheme first announced by developer Emerige in 2016. The firm’s Berlin office, in collaboration with CALQ, had... View full entry
New renderings were released today of one of the city's most visible and notable developments. While the proposed 685-foot tower at the Hudson's site gets the most attention, the office building next door will be an active space with many places for the public to visit. Bedrock unveiled a look inside the 220-foot office building, with office, event, and dining space. — Urbanize Detroit
A revitalization of the historic Hudson’s Department Store site in downtown Detroit, the project will bring 1.5 million square feet of office, retail, event, residential, and hotel space to the area. The development’s design is being led by SHoP Architects and Detroit-based Hamilton Anderson... View full entry
Six months after the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, columnist Kunle Barker wrote in the UK Architects' Journal to take a stand against the industry’s oneiric focus on “lofty ideals of zero-carbon and on soundbites” and towards a more considered system of new project evaluation, advocating... View full entry
New photographs have been released showing construction progress at POST Rotterdam, documenting the restoration and reinvention of a historic post office in the Dutch city. Designed by ODA with Omnam Group, the project sees the 100-year-old building transformed into a hotel, with accompanying... View full entry
