DISCUSSION Carving through slabs to create atriums, adding fenestration where it won’t interrupt the structural system, adding floating floors and reinforcing beams and columns that are slowly failing - among other strategies, are known to be employed in the adaptive reuse of buildings. While this accomplishes added access to natural daylight, increased density of the volume and/or strengthened structure - along with other, positive aspects to the design of a project, it can also be seen that the new type and use of occupation affects the community in different ways, at times either environmentally, economically and socially. Environmentally, the introduction of a new space that has replaced an older one - while taking up the exact same geographical location, area and volume - without spending energy, resources and creating a carbon footprint in razing the old space down and then building the new one up - saves on an enormous amount of resources. Economically, taking up an abandoned space with a function specifically design to attract people, or to fulfill a need of the people in the area - the success of this function, attraction, and need-fulfillment creates a social space where more and more people come in, spend and earn money, get jobs, and return to often to keep revenue steady and growing. Socially, as well, creating these positive markers in places that were disused or about to be demolished - helps with the health of the community. With people woven together into a fabric themselves, within the urban fabric of the city, a hole of disuse in the city has often led to a hole in the community; lack of identity or pride with a place leads to further disuse, widening the urban hole as well, which can lead to hubs of crime and violence. Filling up this rent in the urban fabric with a brand new place - a place that resides in the exact place as the disused building, a place that creates excitement and improves the quality of life and brings back identity to a neighborhood, that reduces the possibility of crime in the area - results in increasing the strength of the communal fabric as well.
In this section, different methods and strategies used to adaptively reuse these buildings covered thus far, will be summarized and condensed, so as to be able to systematically apply them in an approach, on case studies that will be seen later on in the report. Operations & policy Criteria/policies that may be in place to identify/classify buildings as able to be adaptively reused. A widely applicable policy is The Secretary of Interior’s Standards for Rehabilitation, which is detailed in the Appendix. Within/across-use While this is not mentioned in most precedents, it is a step that holds importance in strategy - one that takes in the socioeconomic contexts of the building. Who could be the next occupants of this building? Who were the previous ones? Should
