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25/01/2022

Sustainable re-use and recycling work for heritage buildings and places too
The desire to preserve the special character and historical significance of unique places and buildings is at the heart of heritage preservation. But should heritage be “frozen in time”? Or can it sometimes be adapted for re-use in sustainable ways?

Safeguarding heritage for future generations can celebrate urban histories. But it can also make environmental sense. This includes conserving the embodied energy in buildings and retaining examples of design suited to the local environment.

Further reading: Heritage building preservation vs sustainability? Conflict isn’t inevitable

However, some may see heritage protection as an imposition. This might include owners who wish to add modern sustainability features to a heritage building.

Say, for example, a home owner wants to improve thermal performance and energy efficiency by using double-glazing and solar panels. Would a council heritage officer reject such improvements?

If done well, heritage protection can add value to buildings, neighbourhoods and communities. The benefits can include:

preserving cultural and architectural assets
defining the character of places
contributing to social and community well-being
improving the overall built environment.
What is old is new again
Many of the world’s cities need to accommodate population growth and activities within existing urban areas. Even places and buildings that are treasured for their cultural value can face mounting pressure for demolition and redevelopment to accommodate growth.

Further reading: Saving Sirius: why heritage protection should include social housing

Environmental challenges like climate change are also driving efforts to adapt built environments to be more sustainable and liveable.

How best to protect built heritage then becomes a key question. Fortunately, we can often sustainably modify built heritage for new uses.

Indeed, we have been recycling old places since the first cities were created.

Further reading: Reinventing heritage buildings isn’t new at all – the ancients did it too

“Adaptive re-use” is the process of repurposing built heritage for new functions. It’s based on the idea of “preservation through transformation”.

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Sustainably retrofitting heritage buildings
The possibilities created by adaptive re-use can easily capture the imagination. Could a former chocolate factory be converted into retail spaces? Or a power station be turned into a bookstore, cafe, restaurants or museum? Or a market building be transformed into a museum and studios for artisans?

Adaptive re-use offers potential social, economic, cultural and environmental returns. There are now many successful examples of this. For example, London’s iconic Tate Modern gallery is housed in a former power station.

From power station to art gallery: the Tate Modern in London. Alquiler de Coches/flickr, CC BY
Commentators have noted how since the 1970s formerly disparaged inner-city areas have become trendy around the world. Preserving heritage while allowing buildings and districts to evolve organically in response to current needs is possible.

Further reading: Lessons in living heritage from Tokyo to Adelaide

Buildings are not the only heritage assets that can be adaptively re-used. There are many examples internationally where sites such as cemeteries have been re-used for parks and gardens. One may be seen in the Shandon Architectural Conservation Area in Cork, Ireland.

This historic, heritage-protected graveyard in Shandon has been adapted into a pocket park. Tony Matthews
Further reading: Inner-city neighbourhood shows the way in protecting heritage of centuries past

In Sydney, the Paddington Reservoir Gardens are a recycled former water storage reservoir. It’s now a beautiful urban park. As well as recreation and relaxation, the park offers urban cooling.

Paddington Reservoir Gardens in Sydney were formerly a water storage reservoir. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA
Adaptive re-use is different to “facadism”, where only the external shell of a building is saved. Adaptive re-use attempts to preserve the interior of building too (wherever possible), sometimes incorporating old fittings in playful ways. Facadism is a less elegant and useful version of heritage protection.

An example of ‘facadism’ – only the shell of the building is retained. Newtown grafitti/flickr, CC BY
So what is allowed in adaptive re-use?
Given the many possibilities for repurposing buildings and places, we need to keep in mind what steps can be taken to preserve heritage and improve sustainability. Legal, practical and financial questions are central to decisions on adaptive re-use.

A raft of international and national laws, conventions and organisations have emerged in recent decades to guide heritage management. These include the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), the Burra Charter and the UNESCO World Heritage List. And practical guidance to protect built heritage while sustainably adapting it is becoming more common.

The European Union has developed guidelines and best practice examples for local governments. These provide guidance for achieving ambitious energy efficiency standards when renovating historic buildings. This is seen as a way for heritage buildings to become beacons of sustainable development at the community level.

ICOMOS Australia also has a range of information about guidelines for sustainability retrofits and adaptive re-use of heritage buildings.

For example, let’s return to our earlier example of fitting solar panels to a heritage building. In South Australia the use of solar panels on heritage buildings needs to ensure they are not visible from the street. Hobart City Council has very specific guidelines for incorporating solar in heritage buildings. In Queensland, sustainability upgrades must not damage or obscure views of the heritage building, must not damage the “significant fabric” of the building, and must be sympathetic in size, scale, colour, materials etc.

Adaptive re-use offers great potential to protect built heritage while meeting principles of sustainability. Practices that combine built heritage protection and sustainable development are gaining momentum in many cities. Comprehensive, integrated and strategic guidance is the first and best step towards supporting the exciting possibilities.

25/01/2022

Architecture in 2018: Look to the streets, not the sky
A decade after the global economic collapse, urban development is booming.

This is good news for architects. Indeed, 2018 promises to be a favorable year for the profession: A spectacular array of sleek museums, posh hotels and some of the world’s tallest towers are slated for completion.

But income inequality is on the rise in the United States, with many city dwellers reaping few benefits from the current economic upturn.

The same could be said for the colossal scale and visual theatrics of high-profile buildings. Residential towers for the super rich are transforming the skylines of cities and public spaces are increasingly being privatized. As a result, cities are being shaped according to the desires of the elite.

This is particularly troublesome as many cities are also grappling with the ongoing politics of austerity – less and less investment in public services, infrastructure and public housing. Yet some architects have dedicated themselves to addressing these very problems.

The architecture of social engagement – the idea that buildings should address inequality and improve the lives of all dwellers – first started gaining steam during the Great Recession. It’s important to continue moving this work out from under the shadows of the glossier buildings that tend to receive the most media attention.

Three projects to be built in 2018 – a library in Brooklyn, a low-income housing project in Chicago and transitional housing for the homeless in Los Angeles – demonstrate architecture’s unique power to build, sustain and forge communities.

Fostering local activism
In the popular imagination, cities are often associated with their biggest buildings and largest monuments. But the lifeblood of all cities is their small-scale civic buildings and public spaces: libraries, schools, community centers, parks and playgrounds. These places are gathering spaces for residents; they create robust and enduring urban enclaves.

A new building for the branch library in Brooklyn’s Greenpoint neighborhood – the Greenpoint Library and Environmental Education Center – exemplifies public architecture’s ability to reflect the concerns of local communities.

A massive oil spill that was discovered in 1978 wreaked havoc on Newtown Creek, the waterway bordering Greenpoint to the north. Because cleanup efforts are still ongoing, environmental activism remains a defining aspect of the community’s identity.

Given this history, it’s no surprise that issues of environmental justice were important when it came time to rebuilding a larger library in Greenpoint, one of the more widely used branch libraries in the Brooklyn Public Library system.

A rendering of the Greenpoint Library and Environmental Education Center in Brooklyn, N.Y. Marble Fairbanks
Designed by the architecture firm Marble Fairbanks, the two-story building has all the features of a traditional library, from book stacks to reading rooms. But there are also meeting spaces being built for the expressed use of community activists and environmentalists, as well as an education center for environmental awareness – nods to the neighborhood’s history of environmental activism.

It’s also being built according to the highest standards of green design, with plans to reduce the building’s air pollution, energy and water use. The building’s two green roofs, in addition to its public plaza, will be planted with species native to the region.

A grant from the Greenpoint Community Environmental Fund, created through a settlement with Exxon Mobil over the spill, even paid for part of the new project. Collectively, the library’s design shows how at the local level, environmental justice and social justice are intertwined.

Beating back the tides of gentrification
The same could be said of an affordable housing project being built in the Humboldt Park neighborhood of Chicago’s West Side. As important as public places, affordable housing helps create equitable and accessible cities. Dubbed Tierra Linda, the project is the result of Landon Bone Baker Architects’ ongoing work with the community-based organization Latin United Community Housing Association.

When it’s completed, Tierra Linda will have created 12 small-scale housing projects scattered throughout the neighborhood. Most will be located on lots that were formerly vacant. While all of the buildings plan to incorporate sustainable design practices, one of them will be Chicago’s first affordable, multifamily passive house, which means that it’s designed to dramatically reduce energy use for heating and cooling.

A rendering of Tierra Linda in Chicago, Ill. Landon Bone Baker Architects
These affordable homes are part of a broader effort to maintain the vitality of the neighborhood’s Latino community, which, in recent years, has been threatened by gentrification. The Bloomingdale Trail – an elevated greenway running though Chicago’s Northwest Side – has caused real estate prices to rise in the area.

By collaborating with the community as part of the design process, Landon Bone Baker Architects’ work in Humboldt Park underscores how neighborhood-focused projects can help sustain communities facing economic and social change.

A shipping container as a home?
Affordable housing also has the capacity to build new communities. In Los Angeles’ Westlake neighborhood, the architecture firm KTGY is building Hope on Alvarado, a transitional apartment building for the homeless. (Hope on Alvarado is one of a number of similar housing projects in Los Angeles planned by developer Aedis Real Estate Group.)

The project, which is being privately funded, will address a crisis head on: Last year, California had the largest homeless population in the country, with Los Angeles County experiencing an especially dramatic rise in its numbers of homeless people.

KTGY has plans to use recycled metal shipping containers as the primary units for what will be a five-story building organized around a central courtyard.

A rendering of the interior of a unit in the Hope on Alvarado Housing Project in Los Angeles, Calif. KTGY
It’s certainly an innovative approach, since the use of prefabricated containers allows for quick and cheap construction – necessary, given the dire state of homelessness in Los Angeles. At the same time, it’s not hard to see how the building could create a safe and supportive community for its future residents.

Cities for everyone
Looking at how everyday buildings can strengthen communities and invigorate urban life is becoming increasingly important. Currently over half of the world’s population lives in cities, and urban populations are only expected to grow. Meanwhile, natural and man-made disasters are wreaking havoc on cities around the globe, another trend that promises to continue.

With these challenges in mind, the smaller buildings highlighted in this article can help us understand architecture as a social art – a means to weave an urban fabric that creates lasting social ties. They offer models for thinking about architectural design as a tool that addresses the needs of individual communities – lessons that cannot be learned from the slicker buildings that so often compete for our attention.

After all, museums, hotels and towers do not alone make cities.

25/01/2022

I run ‘facial recognition’ on buildings to unlock architectural secrets
About a decade ago, a modest update to Apple’s iPhoto software showed me a new way to study architectural history. The February 2009 update added facial recognition, allowing users to tag friends and loved ones in their photos. After a few faces were tagged, the software would begin to offer suggestions.

But it wasn’t always accurate. Though Apple’s algorithm continues to improve, it had a tendency to find faces in objects – not just statues or sculptures of people, but even cats or Christmas trees. For me, the possibilities became clearest when iPhoto confused a human friend of mine – I’ll call him Mike – with a building called the Great Mosque of Cordoba.

People – but maybe not computers – can tell whether this is a person’s face or the Great Mosque of Cordoba. Erinc Salor, CC BY-SA
The ceiling of the mosque’s forecourt supposedly resembled Mike’s brown hair. The layering of two Visigothic archways supposedly resembled the area between Mike’s hairline and the edge of his brow. Finally, the related alignment of the Moorish cusped arches with their striped stonework resembled Mike’s eyes and nose just enough that the software thought a 10th-century mosque was the face of a 21st-century human.

Rather than viewing this as a failure, I realized I had found a new insight: Just as people’s faces have features that can be recognized by algorithms, so do buildings. That began my effort to perform facial recognition on buildings – or, more formally, “architectural biometrics.” Buildings, like people, may just have biometric identities too.

Facing the building
In the late 19th century, railway stations were built across Canada and the Ottoman Empire, as both countries sough to expand control of their territory and regional influence. In each country, a centralized team of architects was charged with designing dozens of similar-looking buildings to be constructed throughout a vast frontier landscape. Most of the designers had never been to the places their buildings would go, so they had no idea whether there were steep slopes, large rock outcroppings or other terrain variations that might have led to design changes.

In both Canada and the Ottoman Empire, construction supervisors on the actual sites had to do their best to reconcile the official blueprints with what was possible on the ground. With communications slow and difficult, they often had to make their own changes to the buildings’ designs to accommodate local topography, among other variable conditions.

A composite image showing elements of train stations at Zeytinli, left, and Durak, right, which were built from the same plans, yet feature distinctive ornaments, windows and doors. Eitan Freedenberg, CC BY-ND
What’s more, the people who actually did the building came from an ever-changing multinational labor force. In Canada, workers were Ukrainian, Chinese, Scandinavian and Native American; in the Ottoman Empire, workers were Arab, Greek and Kurdish. They had to follow directions given in languages they didn’t speak and understand blueprints and drawings labeled in languages they didn’t read.

As a result, the engineers and workers’ own cultural notions of what a building should look like and how it should be constructed left their figurative fingerprints on what was built, and how it looked. In each place, there are subtle differences. Some stations’ wooden window frames are beveled, some roofs have finials, and some rounded arches are replaced with ever-so-slightly pointed arches.

Other design changes may have happened more recently, with renovations and restorations. Meanwhile, time has worn down materials, weather has damaged structures and, in some cases, animals have added their own elements – like birds’ nests.

The people behind the facades
In the Canadian and Ottoman case studies, many people had opportunities to influence the final building. The variations are quite like differences between people’s faces – most people have two eyes, a nose, a mouth and two ears, but exactly how those features are shaped and where they’re placed can vary.

Thinking about buildings as objects with biometric identities, I began to use analysis similar to facial recognition to find the subtle differences in each building. My team and I used laser scanners to take detailed 3-D measurements of railway stations in Turkey and Canada. We processed the raw data to create computerized models of those measurements.

Digital scans of buildings lets researchers compare similarities and differences. Peter Christensen, CC BY-ND
That, in turn, revealed the hands of the builders, highlighting the geographic and multicultural influences that shaped the resulting buildings.

This evidence called into question previous assumptions that buildings, like a sculpture or a painting, are primarily influenced by just one person. Our work has shown that buildings really only begin with drawings, but then invite the input of a vast number of creators, most of whom never achieve the heroic status of architect or designer.

To date, there are no good methods to even try to identify these people and highlight their artistic choices. The absence of their voices has only tended to prop up the idea that architecture is made only by brilliant individuals.

As 3-D scanners become increasingly common, perhaps even elements of smartphones, our method will be available to almost anyone. People will use this technology on large objects like buildings, but small ones too. At present, our group is working with Paleoindian points, more commonly known as “arrowheads,” to explore a very different history, geography and set of circumstances than we did with the railway stations.

25/01/2022

25/01/2022