In July/August 2023, the AR showcases the shortlisted projects for the New into Old awards, as well as a series of postcards addressed to the buildings we miss
Since the first AR New into Old awards in 2017, there has been a sea change. While practitioners, judges and editors have long championed the preservation of buildings of architectural significance, today it is clear that all buildings must be saved and readapted, and that the resource scarcity facing us makes hardly any act of demolition justifiable.
This issue features six examples, shortlisted for the 2023 awards, of modest buildings that have been reused. They include Bangkok shophouses, cow sheds, stables and tobacco barns, as well as industrial sites in Meisenthal and Mexico City. The ordinariness of these buildings is testament to the growing urgency of calling an end to demolition: we must ‘recognise our existing built environment as energy already spent’, as Joe Giddings writes in this issue’s keynote.
Many buildings are intentionally demolished, whether to make space for profit, alter historical narratives, eradicate unpopular styles, oppress populations or control territories. Some are disfigured under the banner of ‘renovation’, while others are neglected and left to decay. Buildings are valuable artefacts that need care, but they are increasingly destroyed by severe weather. This issue presents a series of postcards addressed to structures that should not be – or should not have been – demolished: a collective call for an end to this tool of capitalist violence in the face of the climate crisis.
Lead image: Demolition is a tool of the architectural industrial complex. A billboard in Waterloo, London, promises the shiny new city that will replace the part‑demolished buildings around it – an unflinching insight into the destructive reality of ‘regeneration’. Credit: RichardBaker / Alamy
