Making-with, Making-do: Constellations of Concepts and Practices around Adaptive Reuse

Abstract

Every demolition is an act of violence with devastating ecological and cultural repercussions that reverberate for generations. Responding to a reality in which not just buildings but even entire communities are treated as disposable, this research supports and advances adaptive reuse as a more sustainable alternative to wasteful construction models based on demolition and reconstruction. To do so, it engages not only with the material, technical and economic aspects of reusing existing buildings, but also with the wider historical, political and socio-cultural contexts that influence and shape every architectural act.

Representing an exercise in sympoiesis or ‘making-with’, the project deliberately positions itself between practice and research. Through engaging in conversation with a range of practitioners and thinkers, it emphasises how adaptive reuse blurs authorial boundaries – not just across time, through working with previous and future authors, but also across space, as more collaborative modes of practice question previously accepted notions of a single, autonomous author-architect.

The project’s three-part outcome comprises an open-access web platform www.adaptreuse.org, the main thesis publication and a handbook for practitioners. The thesis represents a literary practice of adaptive reuse, a polyform and polyphonic exploration that embodies and performs the ideas it explores. Instead of attempting to develop a universal, fixed theoretical framework, the thesis takes a weak theory approach: it configures a collection of diverse fragments into an open, relational and generative constellation that accommodates rather than resolves difference. Bending time and space, this constellation challenges linear narratives to illuminate and reveal insights across disparate spacetimes.

Through a reparative reading of several key examples, the accompanying handbook offers students and practitioners a set of verbs or lemmas that can be conjugated differently according to the specific context or situation. These lemmas represent concrete, transformative actions that can be translated not only across different projects, but also different disciplines. The critical contribution of the project lies in how it creates new possibilities for the wider discipline of architecture by expanding its existing vocabulary and concepts, offering alternative ways of viewing and engaging with the world, and therefore of constructing it.