Deconstructing Binaries: Demolition and the limits of reuse

Abstract

Contemporary architectural practice – in Western Europe at least – is by necessity moving away from previously dominant, tabula rasa models of demolition and reconstruction, towards approaches based on the care, repair and transformation of existing buildings. In this transition, it is important not to fall into the trap of viewing practices of adaptive reuse through the reductive lens of a preservation/demolition binary. If anything, reuse projects call precisely such ‘either/or’ binary oppositions into question, deconstructing absolute dualities like past/future, old/new, and finished/open-ended to create spaces characterised by hybridity and ambiguity. Likewise, “Ne jamais démolir”, a manifesto for reuse as an ecologically and socially sustainable alternative to wholesale demolition, does not aim to rule out or preclude localised acts of surgical demolition that contribute to maintaining, transforming and extending the life of a building. On the contrary, Lacaton & Vassal insist that nothing should prevent the architect from “‘doing just what is needed’. In other words, what is essential for the project”.

Determining exactly what is needed most often relies not on one single, overarching strategy, but on a whole series of decisions linked to specific architectural interventions or gestures that combine to realise the project. Like all architecture, projects of adaptive reuse are dictated and shaped by an array of limiting factors. Some – such as financial or legislative constraints – fluctuate over time and can therefore be more easily navigated. Others are more structural: for example, the buildings currently most threatened with destruction are those built during the last 50 years, since neoliberal maximisation of profit at any cost has seen floor areas and ceiling heights become much less generous and therefore less easily adaptable. Targeted approaches of partial demolition and deconstruction offer a way to transgress both physical and nonmaterial limits by permitting the investigation, unlocking and resetting of spaces without resorting to wholesale demolition.

Such operations face their own set of challenges: on one hand, heritage concerns that insist on preservation over adaptation impose an stranglehold on buildings that could otherwise find a new lease of life through critical and careful interventions. At the other extreme, valid questions should be raised regarding how much original fabric can be demolished and removed before a building ceases to be a project of reuse but in essence represents a new construction. Furthermore, deeply-ingrained, narrow societal expectations of what constitutes ‘new’ or ‘finished’ architecture often mean experimental projects featuring hybrid constructions or material juxtapositions are resisted and even rejected on aesthetic grounds.

This paper examines the extent to which the preservation/demolition binary represents a false dichotomy that hinders adaptive reuse by unnecessarily limiting the options available to practitioners. It draws on current research undertaken as part of the PhD project Adapt, Reuse, a hybrid, embodied practice of reuse that engages equally with theory and practice in a reciprocal relay. Combining first-hand experience, conversations with practitioners and critical analysis of selected built projects, the paper investigates the work of a number of practices whose creative demolitions trace and identify the limits of reuse in order to test how they might be pushed further. This ongoing research focuses on reference cases at the scale of the architectural intervention rather than at the scale of the project, as a way of identifying approaches, attitudes or gestures that taken together might suggest and enable the development of a wider conceptual framework for adaptive reuse.