Building transformation

Industrial heritage is an important part of our built environment and landscape. It provides tangible and intangible links to our past and has great potential to play a significant role in the futures of our cities, towns, and rural environments. The protection and redevelopment of industrial heritage can contribute to the building of social and cultural capital, environmental sustainability, and urban regeneration.

This book showcases a selection of works completed since 2010 with a wide global distribution. It highlights an encouraging increase in the practice of the transformation, redevelopment, and adaptive reuse of industrial structures. From under-utilized, disused, or discarded reminders of times past, the latest metamorphoses of buildings and structures have imbued them with new purposes in what could be regarded as one more stage in a continuous process of industrial evolution. The four essays written by authors from a variety of backgrounds and locations offer a rich addition to the selection of case studies and could serve as opportunities for further research. This book provides direct, informational reference to architects, researchers, and decision-makers.

It includes projects located in France, Sweden, China, Spain, Chile, the Netherlands, USA, Germany, Portugal, Denmark, South Africa, Italy, Canada, Thailand, Latvia, Belgium, Estonia, and India.

The Design Research Studio, Studio Adapt! in the post-graduate architecture programme at the University of Cape Town, engaged with transformation through the adaptive redesign of existing structures. This paper will look at activities undertaken by students in the studio environment during the 2017 and 2018 academic years.

Starting with the premise that a building could be understood as standing in for abstract thought, the studio introduced the students to a range of theories. Seminars on the found object in art, significance in heritage studies, gentrification, the right to the city, conflicting rationalities, social transformation through spatial transformation and sustainability, encouraged the students to address the problem from multiple angles.

More specific concepts were identified by each individual student through field work, including mappings and conversations with the various stakeholders of their selected sites. The students were required to identify the specific characteristics, challenges and potentials of their sites of study and to allow the found potentials to guide their investigations and design moves. Students were encouraged to treat their design interventions as a means through which to instigate dialogue between various conflicting positions surrounding their sites and areas of investigation, and they were required to consider the social and material implications of interventions on a site.

Projects by students, both theoretical and practical, are used in this paper to illustrate concepts that hold potential for transformative design practices in adaptive reuse. The research reveals issues of interest embedded in the selected sites and presents possible approaches towards the transformation of the city through a series of design propositions presented by students. These include issues such as the right to the city and social justice, typological disruptions, programmatic adaptations, memory and archaeology, and the adaptation of ways of making.

In all cases, the students built on the theoretical framework offered by the studio seminars through a careful reading of the specific character of the existing building, following the narratives provided by the tension between the found form and the new demands brought about by a changed context. In every case the existing was evaluated for what it might offer. Through a series of imaginative explorations, interventions involving various combinations of preservation, erasure and addition, were tested for how they might unlock the hidden potential of these found buildings to contribute to social transformation through their spatial and material transformation.

Purpose-The vacancy of office buildings leads to financial problems for the owners and social problems for the community, e.g. vandalism, dereliction and deterioration. A solution may be found through the conversion of vacant office buildings into housing. Vacancy-threatened buildings are often part of the mediocre part of the building stock. Does conversion make sense in this case? What are the opportunities, threats and risks? What are the critical success factors? The purpose of this paper is to discuss financial, functional, structural, technical and aesthetic issues. Design/methodology/approach-Through previous research at the Delft University of Technology, tools are developed to decide the potential for the conversion of buildings. This paper discusses the risks and chances, and brakes and triggers of transformation projects, based on case studies. These case studies are performed through interviews with professionals involved in the transformation process and through analyses of architectural drawings of the before and after situations. For each project two interviews were held, with the architect and the developer or client. The interviews focussed on the process of the transformation projects. Findings-The conversion of nondescript and unarticulated buildings makes sense from the point of view of sustainability, both ecologically and in an urban regeneration context. These projects will only be interesting for developers of commercial real estate if they can be made economically feasible. Social housing associations also have additional social goals. Through a longer investment perspective these associations can wait for property increases through long-term externalities as result of upgrading of the area. In buildings that are kept because of economical or social feasibility there are strong connections between the target group, the location and the conversion costs. Practical implications-The tools developed have proved to be useful for quick scans of the potential for building conversion. This paper is a first step in trying to depict a more detailed view of the risks and chances of building conversions. Knowledge of the risks and chances of conversion is required to make decisions concerning transformation projects. Originality/value-The paper develops knowledge about transformation projects and decision support tools for the conversion of buildings, based on empirical studies.

The Design Research Studio, Studio Adapt! in the post-graduate architecture programme at the University of Cape Town, engaged with transformation through the adaptive redesign of existing structures. This paper will look at activities undertaken by students in the studio environment during the 2017 and 2018 academic years.

Starting with the premise that a building could be understood as standing in for abstract thought, the studio introduced the students to a range of theories. Seminars on the found object in art, significance in heritage studies, gentrification, the right to the city, conflicting rationalities, social transformation through spatial transformation and sustainability, encouraged the students to address the problem from multiple angles.

More specific concepts were identified by each individual student through field work, including mappings and conversations with the various stakeholders of their selected sites. The students were required to identify the specific characteristics, challenges and potentials of their sites of study and to allow the found potentials to guide their investigations and design moves. Students were encouraged to treat their design interventions as a means through which to instigate dialogue between various conflicting positions surrounding their sites and areas of investigation, and they were required to consider the social and material implications of interventions on a site.

Projects by students, both theoretical and practical, are used in this paper to illustrate concepts that hold potential for transformative design practices in adaptive reuse. The research reveals issues of interest embedded in the selected sites and presents possible approaches towards the transformation of the city through a series of design propositions presented by students. These include issues such as the right to the city and social justice, typological disruptions, programmatic adaptations, memory and archaeology, and the adaptation of ways of making.

In all cases, the students built on the theoretical framework offered by the studio seminars through a careful reading of the specific character of the existing building, following the narratives provided by the tension between the found form and the new demands brought about by a changed context. In every case the existing was evaluated for what it might offer. Through a series of imaginative explorations, interventions involving various combinations of preservation, erasure and addition, were tested for how they might unlock the hidden potential of these found buildings to contribute to social transformation through their spatial and material transformation.

This paper analysis relations between spatial configuration, uses and built heritage in João Pessoa old city centre (Brazil) as part of a recently finished master thesis. Urban transformations that João Pessoa city, dated 1585, has suffered along its centuries have brought a number of consequences for its initial settlement. Its gradual loss in economic relevance to other urban areas was followed by the arousal of some urban trends, recurrently seen in old centre areas of many large Brazilian cities, such as: degradation and loss of original building styles, vacant or underused premises, loss of residential use, feeling of insecurity. Such trends are emphasized by a rapid linearly oriented expansion of Brazilian cities; João Pessoa, first settled by the river, later directed itself speedily towards the sea. Assuming that spatial configuration impacts on movement in the city and affects modes of city occupation and economic dynamics (Hillier, 1996), this research presents the old city centre morphologic responses, comparing its spatial structure, uses, building maintenance and architectural style conservation. Relations between these attributes were investigated, diagnosing incompatibilities that generated some urban pathologies. For this, ground and upper floors uses and conservation state of circa 1800 properties were surveyed, and related to syntactic integration measures (continuity lines and of angular segment analysis), through comparative maps and graphs. Main observations in João Pessoa old city centre were (i) how morphologic transformations followed processes of use and function alterations; (ii) how roads movement hierarchy reflects on current occupation; (iii) consequences of form/function relations in built heritage conservation. Amongst other findings, there was an alignment between the level of topological importance of the Old centre in João Pessoa, variation in its economic importance and the transformation of uses in the area, culminating in the insertion of functions incompatible with built heritage conservation. The concentration of certain uses according to road hierarchy was also observed in the area, as the presence of few residential groups and larger number vacant premises on more segregated routes, and growing loss of original building styles with increasing potential movement, corroborating trends found in other studies in Brazilian cities (such as Trigueiro & Medeiros, 2003; Carvalho & Trigueiro, 2007;). Overall, three distinct sectors of spatial configuration and uses dynamics were identified, which showed distinct relations with built heritage conservation. The study thus contributed-in light of space syntax-to understand urban dynamics pertaining old centres in larger Brazilian cities, and the damaging effects of rapid loss of centrality in a mainly real-estate oriented planning.

Partiendo de la realidad social y económica actual, en la que la especulación, afortunadamente, ha pasado a un segundo plano y en la que escasean los grandes encargos para los arquitectos, detectamos cómo la práctica profesional se orienta a pequeñas intervenciones, que sirven para reutilizar los recursos existentes adaptándolos a los nuevos usos, cuyos proyectos corren el riesgo de ser invadidos por otras profesiones. Observamos que las administraciones públicas comienzan a demandar actuar con criterios como la sostenibilidad y reutilización sobre sus edificios, que se irán extendiendo sobre las propiedades individuales. Se plantea analizar una serie de casos de estudio que sirvan para establecer estrategias como base para resolver los problemas actuales desde la visión del arquitecto.

This paper presents a case study describing a five year search for a new building for a Hospice, and the transformation planning, design and construction of an existing hospital building (polyclinic) into a Hospice of 1200 m2 using Open Building as strategy for process and product.