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Just Do Not Build: The Case for Imaginative Reuse

Aaron Betsky

Just Do Not Build: The Case for Imaginative Reuse
By Aaron Betsky -

The case for concentrating on the reuse of buildings and building material is overwhelming. The question is whether we can do so in a way that is not only environmentally and socially good, but is also beautiful or even awe-inspiring. Too much of the architecture of reuse, restoration, rehabilitation, and plain renovation is so banal as to be as stultifying and depressing as the vast majority of buildings that are constructed every year. More heartening is the emergence over the last few years of a kind of practice I call “imaginative reuse”, which seeks to not only avoid the huge carbon debt, not to mention the loss of open space, the affirmation of social hierarchies, and the sheer ugliness that comes with almost all new construction, but offers instead spatial and material experiences that are as satisfying as the best new architecture of this millennium.

This imaginative reuse manages to create spatial and material effects, as well as social frameworks, of great achievement.
It also largely avoids the use of natural resources that have been mined from their natural resources and that cannot be replaced. This list should also include wood, which is these days grown in unsustainable factory forests that are as bad for the Earth as some forms of mining. Manufactured wood is then assembled using toxic, often oil-based products. Instead of relying on such resources, architects are increasingly engaged in urban mining. This is a technique that goes far beyond the standard reuse of discarded building material to employ whatever our consumer society casts off on a daily basis, from plastic bottles to washing machines, and from windfarm propellers to left-over furniture. Out of this they assemble buildings that, because of their sources and despite the assemblage’s worn appearance, have an esthetic that is truly modern.

Other architects concentrate on the more traditional act of chipping away at existing buildings, revealing their bones and opening their spaces up to new uses. The best of these designers does so in a way that does not go down directly to the existing buildings’ structure, but rather engages in a more careful archeology that preserves and highlights the many layers of occupation that are inscribed within older structures. When they create openings within the fabric they find, they leave the marks of that constructional violence, so that we can understand the act of architecture here in its liberation. When they are forced to add new materials (often the result of urban mining), they use these additions as outlines of vectors of modernity accelerating out of the past on site.

These tactics are not confined to buildings. Some of the best acts of imaginative reuse are those that extend our social scene to the reuse of industrial landscapes. All over the world, former factories, mines, steel mills and other large relics of production have turned into some of our most exciting public spaces, inviting people to play where thousands once toiled. Unused rail lines, former shipping harbors, and parking lots have become places that help define new forms of sociality while letting us explore the landscapes we have made.

Even beyond such an extended arena of imaginative reuse, artists and architects are stretching our imagination with constructions, some of them virtual, some of them consisting of site-specific installations, and some of them actually inhabitable, that reimagine what our world could be. The best of these has the quality of being undecidable as to whether they are evocations of a past or future, or a reimagining of the world we inhabit. While such constructions might challenge our notions of constructability or even feasibility, they function in the way art does in our society: by modeling possibilities that it is up to architects to then install in our society.

Such tactics have turned the remains of the industrial revolution into our modern-day cathedrals and public squares, thus providing us large-scale, monumental examples of how we might move from culture obsessed by (new) production to one focused on making what we have better. In Germany, various governments and institutions have spent the last few decades turning the vast steel plants, mines, and other engines of the Ruhr Area’s industrial might into a continually growing collection of museums, theaters, beer halls, public parks, research centers, and creative hubs. The scale of such buildings as the Zollverein is vast and heroic. Similarly, cities from Copenhagen to Shanghai have turned former port areas into playgrounds, often quite literally with ramps and diving platforms. In New York, a former elevated freight line has become the High Line, a mile-long public park that offers a radically new view on the city. Now firms are taking these ideas to sites such as these around the world, ranging from the former steel mill on the outskirts of Beijing that became the headquarters for the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, to the continual development of the Beltline, a park that will someday circle all of Atlanta. Because of their public nature, these are the anchors of imaginative reuse.

It is the daily reuse of what we have, however, that is becoming the basis for imaginative reuse. Urban mining is not a new concept. For as long as there is recorded history, new constructions have used the remains of demolished or dilapidated ones. In Asia, this has often meant rebuilding exactly what was there when materials decay. In the West, we more often use what historians known as spolia: the repurposing of columns, friezes, pediments, and blocks from older buildings in Rome, first during the Roman Empire, and then by Christians constructing their churches and homes out of these elements. These recycled elements can be quite small, including bricks or stones that fill in gaps in walls, but they also can be whole buildings, including several amphitheaters that turned into housing. When they remain visible, the spolia bring with them, both in reality and by association, the styles and ways of building of which they were part. Such a form of collage architecture has continued through the ages, and was boosted in the 20th century by art movements that similarly assembled their products out of cast-offs and repurposed objects.

Today, there are urban miners everywhere in architecture. There are hardware stores that specialize in offering salvaged materials and a growing genre of websites or apps that digitize the effort. A particular strong nest of such efforts has arisen in the Netherlands, where industrial and furniture designers who banded together in the Droog Design movement starting in 1993 pioneered the radical reuse of scraps, rags, broken vessels and other shards or fragments. The most prominent scavenger is Jan Jongert, whose firm, Superuse Studios, is located in what was once an urban spa and is now BlueCity, a hub for companies that make beer out of food rests and buildings our of discarded fragments. Jongert’s most striking invention has been the use of slightly damaged windmill turbine blades for seating and playground equipment, but what is especially remarkable is that he has used his ad hoc, “use-what-you-find” technique to create spatially exciting structures ranging from housing to clubhouses to offices. His most recent effort is a market stall whose structure consists of the containers that farmers use to bring milk to market. Together with Césare Peeren, he also developed a software program called the Harvest Map (now under hiatus since he sold it to a software company) that lets anyone map and source recyclable elements.

The Brussels-based firm Rotor has developed a similar scheme, Rotor DC, in which they source, acquire, and sell elements that are mainly from late-20th century office buildings being demolished. In the same vein, the Dutch firm Popma ter Steege Architecten (PTSA), when they were asked to design a new research laboratory outside of Leiden, found an existing structure of a similar size and purpose and reused much of it for their new building, BioPartner 5.

In Berlin, the firm now known as b+ (bplus.xyz, founded by Arno Brandlhuber) specializes not only in recycling Brutalist concrete structures, but also in outfitting them with upcycled components. Even more radical is U.S. architect Dennis Maher, who has turned first his own home in Buffalo, New York, and then a nearby church into a continually evolving collage of cast-off materials that are combinations of living and working environments and site-specific installations.

Whole buildings are, of course, the handiest structures to excavate and upcycle. This is something we have also been doing for millennia. This form of reuse ranges from the straight acceptance of what the architect finds (reuse strictly speaking), to attempts to restore what was there (restoration), to an adaptation of what is on site to current needs and technologies (renovation or adaptive reuse). What has arisen in the last few decades is the notion of architecture as a highly selective form of reuse in which the decisions the architect makes concern not what they add or build, but rather what they take away. The design takes the form of the selective peeling away of the layers that have accreted over time, revealing the passage of lives through the structure. Beyond such a peeling of wallpaper or opening up of surfaces, these reductive architects also engage in the making of openings, often taking care to have the violence of that act remain visible in the final result.

Some of the best architects working in this mode are situated in Flanders, where the firm architecten de vylder vinck taillieu has split into two, with Jo Taillieu taking a more focused approach that highlights the beauty of specific found fragments and delights in the craft of whatever he does add to make the renovated structure work. His Twiggy boutique in Ghent is exemplary, including a double-height space where he removed a floor, leaving the marks of the cutting and a fireplace dangling in mid-air. Jan De Vylder and Inge Vinck, meanwhile, are more interested in the roughness and even awkwardness of what they find or have to add. Their largest project to date, the reuse of Charleroi’s Exposition Center for performances, exhibitions, and other cultural uses, exposes the building, leaves dirt piled up around it, and lets hundreds of car parks in what remains of one of the old congress halls. The walls and columns bear the marks both of decades of conventions and expos and of the interventions that have brought the site back to life.

In nearby Brussels, 51N4E has developed a sub-specialty in reusing old buildings, ranging from the former IBM headquarters there, which is now a hotel and co-working site, to a commercial space that is now a music club, to a complex of barracks at the outskirts of town that are evolving into a maker space, community center, and art park. In all these efforts, they delight in leaving as many marks of what they encountered as possible, and add materials that are themselves upcycled. The latter range from sewage pipes to plastic bags. Walk through the army site, ASIAT, and you will find shelters that at first appear as if they are hobo encampments in and around the former barracks, until you notice the care and skill with which the pieces have been designed.

This kind of rough-and-ready renovation has found itself into the mainstream as well. This has been the result of the high visibility of such cultural projects as Frank Gehry’s The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA (formerly Temporary Contemporary) in Los Angeles, of 1983, Lacaton & Vassal’s 2002 Palais de Tokyo, and David Chipperfield’s 2009 Neues Museum. In all these cases, the architects chose to leave much of what these buildings had been and were made of as part of their new arts function. This attitude spread further through the popularity of the renovation of factories into large-scale art sites where galleries and ancillary uses cluster together. The first large version of this was the renovation of a former arms manufacturing site in Beijing into 798 Art Zone, starting in 1995. It was quickly followed by other examples in China and then around the world. Most recently, this mode of reusing old sites where things were produced into consumption complexes has extended into shopping malls, starting with London’s Dover Street Market of 2004, and then extending to such examples as the former Sears warehouse that is now the Ponce City Market and the meat market, now a shopping district – both in Atlanta. In Houston, OMA has sliced and diced an old post office distribution center into another shopping mall.

You can now even live in such sites. In Warsaw, a former office building, reimagined by Marcin Stępniewski-Janowski and interior designers Tremend, is now Hotel Warszawa, where you take your breakfast among the boilers in the basement and sleep staring up at the rough remains of the concrete frame. The Círculo Mexicano in Mexico City, by Ambrosi | Etchegaray, inhabits the ruins of the photographer Manuel Álvarez Bravo’s home with minimalist shelters weaving between the crumbled brick walls.

It is in private houses that this form of cut and thrust, peel and preserve, open and reveal form of reuse has become most sophisticated. The United Kingdom has seen the renovation of a number of historic properties that were no more than ruins into expressive but luxurious residences. Examples include Astley Castle, designed by Witherford Watson Mann and finished in 2013, and The Parchment Works, a former paper mill, which Will Gamble Architects recreated as a home in 2019. A lot of the esthetic here owes its look and feel to the squatter movement of the 1960s, as well as to the delight in the beauty of a worn and tattered gentility popularized by magazines. Again Taillieu, working with the ruins of a former farmhouse in Flanders, created a beautifully disjunctive private home, while b+ turned a former lingerie factory into a bare concrete bunker for living outside of Berlin.

In other countries, such renovations have extended to social housing. On the island of Mallorca, Spain, Carles Oliver cut into the walls of a 17th century building to allow its occupation by local residents who have been priced out of the housing market by the tourist industry. In Scotland, the London-based firm Assemble has been working for more than a decade on a socially stressed part of Liverpool called Granby Four Streets. There, they have renovated rowhouses, preserving much of the original fabric and adding elements that they manufactured in local ceramics and woodworking workshops they helped found. The center of their efforts is the Winter Garden, a home that was too far dilapidated to make sense as a residence, and which now shelters a community center between its exposed brick walls and under a glass skylight. In China several hutong, or former clan-based residential complexes, have been renovated, most successfully by Zhang Ke (ZAO). Amateur Architecture Studio, founded by Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu, went to the small village of Wencun and worked with inhabitants to rebuild ruins of homes to make the site more attractive and livable both to the existing residents and to visitors. They have reassembled some of the structures, opened others, and woven new public spaces through the whole village.

Beyond such concrete efforts at coaxing the new out of the old, or revealing the past within the everyday life of the present, there are also projects that reimagine a more radical disjunction of time and space. Some of these are realized as inhabitable sites, such as the Heidelberg Project in Detroit, assembled by Tyree Guyton between 1986 and 2018, and the Dorchester Project in Chicago, similarly put together by Theaster Gates in 2006. Some, such as Watch the Tone, by Studio Barnes in Memphis, promise to be more permanent sites.

Other, more temporary, artworks reimagine sites from elsewhere that are out of time and place. British artist Mike Nelson for a long time specialized in building such elaborate sets that, for instance, transported a courtyard from Istanbul to the British Pavilion in the Venice Biennale of 2011. Dutch artist Marjan Teeuwen gains permission to reassemble structures that are about to be torn down into carefully composed piles which she then photographs. Usually, these documents are all that remains of this reimagined reality. More recently, artists and architects have imagined sites that can exist only as projections or digital propositions, such as Wanda Spahl and Dominic Schwab’s 2023 Geography of Ghosts.

The danger with all this work is that it is a form of gentrification. Any investment demands, in our capitalist system, a return, and most of the projects describe above serve those who can pay for them. Even when they are public, such as is the case with the High Line, they lead to a massive reevaluation of the area around them, which drives out users and inhabitants. Moreover, reuse in all its forms is currently more expensive than new builds. Until our codes and regulations, as well as our decisions about where we as a society chose to invest – in recycling rather than either private or public monuments, for instance – change, that means that even imaginative reuse repeats the fact that architecture has always been, is, and for the foreseeable future will be the built affirmation of the socio-economic elite in all its wants and values.

Still, what these projects and the many more that are currently being carved out of the humanmade environment all do is reimagine the past as a tool for understanding and inhabiting the present. They show us the beauty of what we have inherited. They combine the romance of the ruin as well as the utopian impulses of architects to make a better world. They make where we came from not just a memory told in history, but a built reality. They then open that constructed narrative up so that we can reinhabit it and build out our own lives in ways that are more open, sustainable, and beautiful.

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