AR Reading List 047: adaptive reuse

The answer is not always a building – sometimes the building already exists. Taking once obsolete or abandoned structures, it is possible to imagine that buildings have a life long beyond that which was originally intended or expected. In this week’s reading list, we consider this duality between old and new. Ricardo Flores and Eva Prats, winners of the 2019 AR New into Old awards, referred to our ‘right to inherit’ and speak of buildings as having a social and a physical ‘inheritance’. We look at the new meanings and associations that can be threaded through structures with even the richest history.

As the need for sustainable alternatives to building anew becomes increasingly urgent, the New into Old awards celebrate the creative ways buildings are adapted and remodelled to welcome new contemporary uses. Launched in 2017, the awards recognise the imaginative appropriation of existing structures, from innovative insertions to ambitious adaptations.

The 2021 AR New into Old awards are now open for entries! The earlybird deadline is Friday 19 February 2021 – find out more here.

Bombay mix: Saat Rasta housing, Mumbai, India, by Studio Mumbai, AR July/August 2017, Smita Dalvi
‘Each programme is more like scaffolding, for there is the possibility of constant rearrangement in the way one occupies space’

Circle of life: Flores & Prats’ Sala Beckett theatre in Barcelona, AR December/January 2019/20, Rafael Gómez-Moriana
‘Instead of a ‘‘cool’’ museological-minimalist architecture of visual display, this is a ‘‘warm’’, more playful and ambiguous architecture of appropriation and reuse’

Changing places: reuse of obsolescent buildings in south London, AR February 2019, Owen Hatherley
‘Putting cultural spaces into antique bathhouses and fire stations is one thing; putting them into 1960s car parks and malls is quite another’

‘Modern Beijing is no palimpsest city: its evolution is one of wiping off and replacing’, AR December 2015, Filippo de Pieri
‘The surviving traces of the urban past are not stratified under one’s feet but rather hidden in plain sight, as a plurality of urban fragments removed from their original context’

Mine craft: Terrils du Martinet in Charleroi, Belgium by Dessin et Construction, AR April 2018, Eleanor Beaumont
‘Our intervention is only a stage in the life of the place or building in which we intervene, our work is only a stone in the history of the place’

Communications Centre by Jakob + MacFarlane (Boulogne-Billancourt, France), AR June 2005, Catherine Slessor
‘In places the walls do not meet the floor, but simply hang from the roof structure, like gigantic pieces of scenery, sculpting the internal landscape’

Open City: Ex Cárcel Parque Cultural by HLPS in Valparaíso, Chile, AR November 2012, Michael Webb
‘The challenge was to turn a place of dread into a friendly oasis − ‘‘a flowerpot in the Valparaíso hills’’ as the architects call it − opening a once impenetrable site to the city’