Adaptive Reuse & Recycling

The elective that teaches a designer the greenest and most rooted way to build: not to demolish and start again, but to give an old building a new life and to design with recycled and reclaimed materials. It begins with adaptive reuse itself, its history and its theories, cultural inheritance and the whole range of heritage buildings and old structures, ascertaining a building's structural stability and estimating its prolonged life, the strategies of adaptive reuse and the investigation of its material finishes, and the central truth that the reuse of buildings is a key to sustainable development, because the greenest building is very often the one that already exists. It teaches the need for recycling of materials, the logic behind it and the recycling of steel and wood and glass, the estimation of the quality of recycled timber and the criteria for recycling steel and glass, and it clears the field's comfortable myths from the start, that reuse is always cheaper, that old buildings are unsafe, that everything is recyclable, and that reclaimed material is inferior, showing instead that steel and glass recycle almost infinitely with their qualities intact while many laminates and composites and contaminated mixes cannot be reused at all, that much recycling is really downcycling to a lower use, and that old reclaimed timber is often finer than new if it is graded and checked. It teaches the concept of sustainability and the need for conservation, the Earth Summit declaration and the definition of sustainable development, the economic and social and environmental issues and the green rating of buildings and the criteria for LEED, and architectural conservation, the conservation of heritage and important buildings, the levels of intervention from maintenance to preservation to restoration to reconstruction to adaptation, and the revival of old building techniques and finishes. It teaches the design generation process in adaptive reuse, the analysis of the existing structure and the importance of the building assessment report, the process of documentation and condition mapping in deciding design recommendations, the design logic and the role of the various parameters in concept generation, and the strategies for re-modelling. And it ends in adaptive reuse in practice, in the case studies and the industrial visit and the live reuse project, so that a student can take a tired old building and, with respect for its fabric and its memory and its embodied worth, give it a dignified and useful second life. Throughout, it treats the designer as a steward of both heritage and resources, keeping the past and saving the future in the same careful act.