6 minute read
Discussion
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.
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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
the use continue with this reuse, or should the use shift to another field? These questions are answered by who may be a promising bracket or hold in the market, what they could be looking for that may not be provided satisfactorily to them yet, and so forth.
Structural analysis By analysing the structure of a building, it helps to see what kind of loads the building could bear, which would then narrow down the options of what different/new/adapted functions the reused building could provide. It also hits upon snags that may hold up construction or increase the budget, and allow the team to either maneuver around such an issue, or solve it head on.
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Obsolescence Related to the previous point, it must be checked whether or not the structure of the system can live up to the standard building code requirements of the new use planned. This can either lead to a total change of new use, or a strategy to overcome this obstacle. [67] An example of this was seen in the Netherlands’ example of office buildings being converted into residential units - buildings before the 1980s were more difficult to adapt to housing repartitioning, given the structural rhythms of the time.
Lighting Oftentimes the lighting requirements for different uses differ vastly - turning a warehouse with sparse windows that ran mostly on electrical lighting in the early 1900s into, for example, a kindergarten, will not be sustainably accommodating to the users and designers of today, without any alterations to the building. Therefore, attention must be paid to understand how natural daylight can be introduced into spaces, what quality this light would be, what changes may have to be made to the space to achieve this desired effect, and how those changes may affect the structure of the building.
Privacy Privacy is also something to perceive and design for sensitively - different typologies may require different levels of privacy. A hospital being converted into a university, for example, would require around the same amount of noise barriers between wards/classrooms, as well as the same amount of openness and connectivity to the rest of the hospital/university. However, converting a large warehouse into stacked condominiums would require more effort - acoustic barriers would have to be installed, perhaps with heavier partition walls, and false ceilings added to increase the amount of insulation sound would have to travel through between the floors of different tenants.
Dynamism Adaptive reuse most definitely - even in the case of buildings that are not historically important - have an element of conservation, as well as innovation. A question to be asked when considering a building for a new design once it has been approved for reuse, is, what about this facade, or interior space, is unique? How can this be kept, to preserve the identity of this place while simultaneously evolving it into something new? This has been seen in Providence Arcade, in the Tacoma courthouse, in the reuse of historic houses into hotels - even when there is new construction that is an extension to what is being reused - a structure’s identity is, in a sense, its dignity, and the dignity of its users. Erasing that, unless in cases of impossibility of access, or some
such issue, does not improve anything - but keeping it, preserves and further grows the identity of both place and person.
Dynamism can also be introduced. The creation of an atrium is the addition of dynamism - the floors in Australia’s woolstores were not necessarily something unique to the design of the building, and so were removed (and materials reused elsewhere in the project) easily, in order to create atriums of double to triple height, creating a vantagepoint to appreciate the building’s interior from, flooding the space with daylight, and allowing people to mingle comfortably in a space that gives an impression of comfort, grandeur and stability.
Project profiling Throughout this process of analysis and design planning, a project profile should be assembled, considering not only the project, but also its context, an analysis of the site, what possible client markets around the area could be interested in, if there are any public transit or other mainline routes nearby that would enable a larger amount of people to access the project and increase the socioeconomic value of the area or not, and so forth. Keeping these and perhaps other pointers on the record for constant reference, can continue to help shape the project until the end.
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There are, of course, other ways to understand, analyse and profile projects for adaptive reuse other examples would be to see what social effects the building has had, and how society has affected the building in turn; or, pinpointing different elements of the building on a basis of pure design, to see what could or could not be taken apart and put together again for a new space, or a new function, or both; or, understanding how the building was shaped by politics - the style of an era, and how appropriate would it be to change certain elements, or to keep some, to make way for a new political era, or to make way for a society with different causes and values.
