2 Cases for Adaptive Reuse

We first learned of Liliane Wong and her focus on architectural interventions with the 2021 book Interventions and Adaptive Reuse: A Decade of Responsible Practice, edited by Wong and Markus Berger. It collects articles from the first ten years of Int|AR Journal of Interventions and Adaptive Reuse, which Wong had founded in 2008. The book was timely for us, given that our Building of the Week feature in 2021 focused exclusively on adaptive reuse and renovation projects. Little did we know at the time, but five years earlier Wong had written Adaptive Reuse: Extending the Lives of Buildings, giving strong historical and theoretical grounding to the centuries-long practice of adaptive reuse and its increasing relevance to contemporary architecture. Nearly a decade since its 2016 publication, the needs to save buildings and adapt them for longer lifespans have become even more pressing and more widely discussed; hence the revised, expanded edition published by Birkhäuser last month.

A focus on history and theory presupposes language, which leads to terminology. Fittingly, Adaptive Reuse: Extending the Lives of Buildings begins with a zero chapter, “Babel,” that provides definitions of important terms for adaptive reuse, such as adaptation, conversion, maintenance, and repair. These are not dictionary definitions, mind you, but instead are quotes by important architects, authors, groups, and others spanning decades and in some cases centuries. Important here is the way these terms have shifted over time, influenced by trends and discoveries in architecture and historic preservation as much as in realms outside of these disciplines.

The first of the fifteen numbered chapters that follow is “New Order: The Frankenstein Syndrome,” a title (and illustration, above) that is humorous but which also gets at an easily graspable negative aspect of adaptive reuse: misguided motives can lead to “monsters.” For Dr. Frankenstein, it was the substitution and stitching together of different body parts into a new creature. Extending the metaphor to architecture, “the failure of this new creature,” in Wong's words, “lies in the introduction of a new and incompatible order within an existing one. This incompatibility is the Frankenstein Syndrome.” Architects aware of the ordering and other architectural principles of an existing building are more likely to develop adaptive interventions that don't fall prey to the Frankenstein Syndrome. But projects predicated on economics, in Wong's view, “can more easily fall prey to an incompatibility between the existing and the new.”

Much of the book's first third is given over to chapters addressing “immortality” and shifting theories over preservation and reuse, from Viollet-le-Duc and Alois Riegl centuries ago, to the Athens Charters and Venice Charter last century, and Rem Koolhaas and other voices this century. Then, in the seventh chapter, Wong brings up a term—host—that permeates the approaches and examples laid out in the remainder of the book. The term took this reader back to “The Object of Post-Criticsm” in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (1983), in which the author, Gergory L. Ulmer, describes the host's guest as a parasite. One can see projects like Daniel Libeskind's Military History Museum in Dresden being parasitical, but Wong prefers the more benign term guest, and she elevates the importance of the host in adaptive reuse projects: “The purpose of this book,” she writes in this chapter, “lies in establishing the concept of the host structure as an entity and investigating the means by which alternations and interventions can be made in support of its independent existence.”

Although Wong defines and describes numerous host structure types (entity, shell, semi-ruin, fragmented, relic, group) and then illustrates projects that fit them, Extending the Lives of Buildings is not a survey that architects or architecture students can mine for inspiration. While certain projects recur throughout the book as seminal examples of adaptive reuse (e.g., Michelangelo's Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri, Sverre Fehn's Hedmark Museum, David Chipperfield's Neues Museum, Peter Zumthor's Kolumba, etc.), readers must venture elsewhere for additional illustrations and information on these and other projects of interest … or delve into Adaptive Reuse in Architecture: A Typological Index. Published by Birkhäuser in 2023, this second book by Lilian Wong finds much overlap with Extending the Lives of Buildings but takes a more methodical approach to the subject and the documentation of precedents within. The book uses graphs, lists, texts, and brief case studies of notable projects to focus on a half-dozen typologies that have become hosts in transformations to other uses by guests over the last half-century.

The year of publication is not accidental or arbitrary, as 2023 was the 50th anniversary of the first use of the term “adaptive reuse” in a dictionary, three years after the first Earth Day. For sure, there were adaptive interventions before 1973, but notable ones are few and sporadic, with Michelangelo transformation of part of the Baths of Diocletian into Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri in 1562, for example, being an outlier over centuries before and after. But Wong noticed a steady progression of adaptive reuse projects in the 1970s, 80, and 90s, and an explosion of the same this century. 

Wong describes the book as such: “It is an investigation to understand and to explain the phenomenon in the 21st century of a surge in specific groups of decommissioned buildings that were subsequently transformed into notable adaptive reuse projects.” Not surprisingly, half of these groups—the typologies of the book's title—are industrial: energy, manufacturing, and agriculture. The balance are transportation, religion, and an initially vague category: new heritage. Host structures in this chapter fall into a diversity of typologies, with resulting new uses even more diverse. “Expanded concepts of heritage reflecting cultural and societal changes,” Wong writes, “prompted new approaches to intervening in existing built heritage and even spurred new types of heritage for adaptation.”

Also happening in 1973 was engineer Martin Cooper's invention of the cell phone—a 2.5-pound (1.13kg) device called the DynaTAC (Dynamic Adaptive Total Area Coverage). Wong mentions this in the introductory chapter of A Typological Index, and then, writing in 2022, she points out in the last chapter the removal of the last public pay phone in New York City on May 23, 2022, a victim of the technological advances of cell phones and smartphones. The 50-year-shift from wired to wireless parallels the rise of adaptive reuse over the same period as explained in the book's graphs—slow at first but then rapid, nearly exponential—but it also hits on the fact that most buildings must be considered for either demolition, preservation, or adaptive reuse around the time they turn 50. Climate change makes it imperative to remove demolition as a consideration (or at least as the default first choice for owners and architects), while A Typological Index clearly illustrates that the waning of certain typologies over the same timeframe makes adaptive reuse an increasingly considered approach. It's hard not to end this article with Carl Elefante's much-cited statement from 2007, which Wong includes in each of these books, and which neatly summarizes the continued rise of adaptive reuse explored within them: “The greenest building is one that is already built.”