Expanded Table of Contents and Complementary Reading to Consider
Preserving with Purpose
Reimagining Buildings for Community Benefit
By Amy Hetletvedt
Preface
The preface is a first-person presentation of questions that emerged for me during a decade of living in Detroit and how I’ve continued pursuing these questions about buildings, about blight – about disinvestment, demolition, and the metaphysical chasm between ruin and restoration. The book invites readers to enter the discussion on how, together, we can incrementally change course, reimagining buildings for community benefit.
Introduction
In disinvested communities, the deep effects of absence are visible within the constructed ecology of the environment. There is a marked vacancy and lack of investment to fully address the properties that remain. Yet abandoned or distressed buildings contain not only embedded energy, but embedded possibilities to be reintegrated into an ecosystem of purpose.
Part I Addressing the Challenge
Part I examines the challenges of historic preservation and adaptive reuse, especially within the context of disinvested communities, where buildings are disproportionately lost and access to capital resources may be low. These chapters invite a broad audience of readers to consider the why of vacant, abandoned, and distressed buildings and what we can do about it.
Chapter 1 Why Buildings Are Being Lost: Burdens and Barriers
This chapter explores some reasons why buildings are lost, to build a foundation for understanding how community residents and professionals can find a different way forward.
Disinvestment is a cause of so-called blight, where conditions of the built environment include a high incidence of vacant, distressed, and abandoned properties. Communities often see demolition as the best fix for the financial burden of these properties and the health and safety problems that they represent. The structures of the architecture and preservation professions can present obstacles to restoring or reusing buildings in disinvested communities.
Buildings are also lost through exportation and exploitation, which have a psychological impact on community residents. When buildings are lost – or hampered from being saved - what is being lost is not only the buildings themselves, but their potential benefit as a resource to the community. Removing resources from a community removes potential opportunities to use those resources in creative re-making.
Chapter 2 Why Buildings Matter: Purposes for Preserving
Buildings matter because they are an essential ingredient of social infrastructure. When decay and demolition hollow out a community, poorer social infrastructure can negatively impact its residents.
Existing buildings contain embodied energy – including creative possibilities to sustain and benefit their communities. When they are eliminated, the problems that they represent may disappear, but so does their potential. Buildings contain possibilities to benefit communities. They can be reimagined for practical, use-based purposes and as a medium for telling important stories and histories
Sometimes, it is important for a community to prioritize an endangered building to ensure its continuance – without an immediate program for re-use. A neighborhood inventory of buildings and values helps guide future efforts. Saving buildings in disinvested communities is about so much more than the physicality of the structures or their monetized value. These
buildings are not only critical to the communities of which they are a part, they’re critical to fostering a more compassionate, sustainable, and healthier society.
Chapter 3 What Works: Processes and Perspectives
The perspective on distressed buildings can be broadened to include the creative, material, and artistic resources that exist within and around a community. Building professionals (architects, engineers, preservationists, planners) can be a resource to the community in the process of regeneration by developing visualizations and images; and by linking physical transformations with neighborhood values and stories.
Building professionals and community development corporations can be a resource for communities as they engage with big plans but can also help facilitate smaller plans that ignite alternative possibilities for disinvested communities. A foundation for healthy engagement is when architects and other building professionals position themselves as shared generators with the community.
Incremental building processes help with financing and allow greater opportunity for individuation and innovation. At the community scale, the iterative process involves prototyping and scaling ideas and projects over time, which allows for adjustment and experimentation and can also demonstrate value. Considering alternatives for financing professional services and ways to make historic standards more porous are valuable and ongoing dialogues.
Part II – Purposeful Approaches to Existing Buildings
Part II is a catalog of the three approaches outlined in Chapter 2 (priority, prosaic, and poetic). The approaches are not organized by level of intervention. Rather, they are organized according to the building or site’s role in the community. This organization places less emphasis on the building’s physical integrity, and more emphasis on how the buildings work integrally with and are integral to their community on many levels. A building is an object, but it’s an object that’s activated by its community and its value is in service to the community.
Note: Although not all the case studies featured in these chapters (4 – 6) are located in what may be described as disinvested communities, they demonstrate techniques or processes that can be useful in a disinvested context.
Chapter 4 Priorities: Saving Endangered or Threatened Buildings
The priority approach matters because it is first and foremost an act of resistance. It permits the continuity of a building for future use and benefit. The priority approach is built upon an inventory because there are usually more distressed buildings in a disinvested community than can be simultaneously addressed.
Architects and community activists around the world have used a priority approach to stabilize and structurally support, to mothball and move, to protest and document endangered and threatened buildings. The priority approach is explored through five case studies:
Stabilization: Mullanphy Emigrant Home (St. Louis, Missouri, US)
Structural Support: Chantry at Kilve (Kilve, Somerset, UK)
Mothballing: Homes of Springfield District (Jacksonville, Florida, US)
Protest and Documentation: Richard Nickel in Chicago (Chicago, Illinois, US)
Moving: Collected Thoughts and Examples
Chapter 5 The Poetic: Activating Buildings Through Narratives
The poetic approach matters because visual narratives and artistic recontextualization can foster understanding and acknowledgment of untold or under-told perspectives. The narratives that are told about a place have a powerful effect on shaping the place.
A poetic or narrative approach towards existing buildings activates conversations, enabling the buildings to serve as witnesses to an event or for a cause, or to serve as memory markers when significant buildings no longer exist. The poetic approach is explored through five case studies:
Conversations: The Heidelberg Project (Detroit, Michigan, US)
Interlocutors: The Marysburg Project and the Dollhouse (Marysburg, Saskatchewan, and Sinclair, Manitoba, Canada)
Witness for Justice: Ben Roy’s Service Station (Money, Mississippi, US)
Witness for Peace: Bombed Out Church (Liverpool, Merseyside, UK)
Memory Markers: Collected Thoughts and Examples
Chapter 6 The Prosaic: Activating Buildings Through Narratives
The prosaic approach matters because it brings the building back into a use-value relationship with its community, tapping into the building’s regenerative capacity. Pursuing short-term, partial, or incremental practical uses for a site offers a beneficial way forward.
Artists and architects around the world have used a prosaic or use-based approach towards existing buildings to grow food, to detoxify the environment, as a host for education initiatives, and as a way to shelter guests and to facilitate resident participation and self-building of their own housing. The prosaic approach is explored through five case studies:
Shelter: Million Donkey Hotel (Prata Sannita, Italy)
Gardens: Plant Concert in the City Club (Newburgh, New York, US)
Remediation: De Ceuvel (Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
Education: Bánffy Castle (Bonţida, Romania)
Individuation: Denny Row Housing (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, US)
Part III Community Examples: Profiles of Purpose
Part III offers profiles of four places that were in a cycle of vacancy or at a stage of critical abandonment but have, over time, redeveloped buildings using the approaches described in this book. These profiles describe how incremental actions on existing buildings over time have built momentum and attracted investment for larger-scope projects and how smaller-scaled projects have broadened participation and increased creative energy.
Chapter 7 Radical Hospitality
Profile of the Dorchester Projects and Stony Island Arts Bank in Chicago (Chicago, Illinois, US)
Artist Theaster Gates’ approach to the renovations of three structures on Dorchester Street invites the buildings into usefulness and hospitality. Gates programmed the spaces as repositories for cultural resources that were being divested. Gates and the Rebuild Foundation later saw value in the Stony Island Bank building as a hub for cultural collections and because of its potential for narrative and critical commentary.
Chapter 8 A Different Story to Tell
Profile of Menokin and Remembrance Structure in rural Virginia (Warsaw, Virginia, US)
The former plantation home and site have become a multilayered effort to tell not only the story of the home – its construction techniques, disrepair, and the technical aspects of its repair – but also of the people involved in the building, including the enslaved laborers who built the house and worked the land. A Remembrance Structure on the site serves as an abstracted memorial, opening up alternative paths of experience and interpretation.
Chapter 9 Service is Your Rent
Profile of 10 Houses on Cairns Street and Granby Winter Garden in Liverpool (Liverpool, Merseyside, UK)
Community members’ decades of caretaking and advocacy were the foundations of the renovation of 10 homes on Cairns Street, an incremental process that contributed to the wellbeing of the community through the development of a workshop and maintenance of affordable housing. The Granby Winter Garden claimed the hollowed shell of two adjacent homes as a community garden, magnifying resources internal to the community.
Chapter 10 Social Sculpture
Profile of Project Row Houses and ModPod in Houston (Houston, Texas, US)
Shifting the perception of an overlooked housing type became the work of a group of artists and what eventually became Project Row Houses, with a focus on public art, art education, affordable housing, and supporting young mothers. Innovations like the ModPod exemplify incremental engagement at the building scale. Over time, a social sculpture process has revitalized this neighborhood creatively and collaboratively.
Conclusion
The built structures of our communities reflect our attempts to erase or control; or our willingness and courage to edit and adapt. Distressed buildings need all kinds of people – the pragmatic, the brave, the visionary, the technical – to weave a way through financing and codes, through ethical and environmental considerations.
We must continue to thoughtfully adapt our preservation standards to be more porous, to adjust our ways of working to serve the broader health, safety, and wellness of all society, and to advocate for the re-use of existing buildings. Preserving with purpose can benefit communities, society, and our environment.