Treat Buildings with Respect
Illustration by Ben de Rubertis
Our building heritage should not be ground up to achieve planning efficiencies they were never designed for.
It was a pie chart that got me thinking. One slice was the “before,” representing an academic program that had been developed and blessed by an academic institution. The “after” slice represented a repositioning of that program to fit an existing structure. I was encouraged: Here was some evidence that our collective exposure to arts districts that occupy former industrial areas, pizzerias in old automobile garages, and art galleries in old bakeries had gotten us thinking about the many charms of old stuff. It had led to a shift in what we value, so much so that we were willing to rethink our design process to include a meaningful dialogue with the old stuff to see what makes it great. That said, it is surprising to see so many contemporary instances of renovations that treat buildings purely as space assets.
The idea that the appropriateness of a building for a contemplated use resides solely in its volume, area, and systems adequacy negates nearly every aspect of culture and placemaking. We are slow to notice the shortcomings in a rehabilitation: Perhaps because it is harder to see, it is easier to ignore. Or perhaps it is because our expectations are tempered by what a building has been rather than inspired by what it could become. That shortsightedness is costing us opportunities to create better, more dynamic places through reuse. To realize a building’s potential, we must grant it status as a living thing. Buildings should have a say in how they are adapted. They should not be treated as means to an end, but as ends in themselves. Finally, buildings in a state of transition from one kind of cultural artifact to another should not have their history erased or scrubbed but rather celebrated, because that history is beautiful.
How might this approach change our thinking—as owners, design professionals, and contractors—as we consider what kind of a future is best for an existing building?
Lean Into the Language of Building “Agency”
Buildings are as embarrassing as we are. Or perhaps a better way to put it is that they bear the traces of the many ways we fail them and then project those failings back on us.
When we assess a building, we are confronted with those failings on human terms. We think of deferred maintenance as a form of neglect. We speak of “building diagnostics,” “sick building,” and “co-morbidities.” And who has not waited to hear a roofer or plumber deliver news with the same sense of anticipation with which we might greet a doctor or nurse? The terms may seem accidental, but it is encouraging that our language about our buildings is aligned with the words we use to talk about ourselves. After all, buildings form much of the context in which we live our lives.
Choosing to adapt any existing building implies we have learned to value something essential about it. Its new program should accommodate that essence, and feature it in the new design. This may require us to scale back the level of intervention, or to rethink where we are spending money on the project. If the building has steel windows, aluminum windows may not be a respectful replacement. We can always ask, ”Does this building look and act like a better version of itself?”
Talk About Buildings Like They Were in the Room
Can this building gracefully accommodate what we are asking of it? This is one of the most important questions to be asked on a project. The biggest stakeholder in this question is the building itself, which is why it is critical to ask the question when design is well underway and more is known about this building. It is at this time that the building can participate in the conversation about its future.
There’s this big divide in design between programming and placemaking, because everything that happens after that handoff is culture. Everything. There's no other thing that's going to happen. Everything that happened up to that point is about money. And so how are you supposed to, in an instant, catch a baton that is completely about money and pass it off to make a place with it?
A great deal about what a project will be resides in things that are unsaid and may not have even germinated as a hope or a vision. This may help to explain the boom in various visioning and project alignment sessions that planners and builders are now more routinely employing. Yet even visioning must reckon with what exists, which brings us to a final requirement.
Let’s Fall in Love First and then Figure Out How to Make it Work
Speed dating derives from something we know to be true as people: that aligning on values without an effervescent joy sparked between people is a dull exercise. Values certainly can’t collide for long, but we have this cliché for good reason: Let’s fall in love first and then we’ll figure out how to make it work. Who this character already is has much to say about what he or she can become. We work with a person’s strengths, so why should a building be any different? Closing our eyes to reality and imagining a building as being perfectly ready to “begin again” excludes too much of the glory of what it has been and done up to now.
Grafting new components onto old things either can work or can fail miserably. What conditions success or failure is entirely in our heads: Are we willing to see and understand what we are working with? For the same reason, adaptations can succeed in every aspect of formal design and still fail to be authentic: Refinishing of all the accumulated patina of character strips us of something in ourselves as well. It’s hard to trust a completely refinished and reworked building. What are its secrets? What is it hiding? We wouldn’t tolerate this kind of revisionism in a friend.
The Bottom Line
Deferred maintenance, our attraction to the shiny new toys of new structures, climate science, and the very real possibility that we may already have enough buildings all converge to speak of the need to adapt and reuse our buildings. But this challenge arrives amidst a din of raised voices about demographic cliffs, interest rates, and inflation. It is up to us to settle ourselves down and work as advocates for the best way for us to save resources, and in so doing, save ourselves. To do so, we need to see our built environment the way we see our communities and families: as an inextricable part of what raised us, so that we can create the language and conversation that allows us to get after what matters most of all—culture.
By Ben de Rubertis, principal, Flad Architects
