Page 54 - Beyond Decommissioning

The fundamentals of industrial redevelopment 35

risk of losing track of the former use—in this way losing the identity of the structures—
should be given attention.
The adaptive reuse of a historic building should have minimal impact on the her-
itage meaning of the building and its setting. First, developers should try to understand
why the building has heritage status, and then pursue development that, while recog-
nizing the building’s past, gives it new objectives. Adaptive reuse is an intrinsic failure
if it does not protect the building’s heritage.
The most successful adaptive reuse projects are those that best respect and preserve
the building’s heritage, while concurrently adding a modern, state-of-the-art layer that
provides value for the future. In this way, sustainability is added to preservation.
Sometimes, adaptive reuse is the only way that the building’s fabric will be properly
maintained, disclosed, or interpreted. Where a building can no longer function with its
original purpose, a new use through adaptation may be the only way to preserve its
heritage values (Australian Government, 2004). This reference suggests generic
criteria to ensure that an adaptive reuse project has minimal impact on a building’s
heritage values, including:
discouraging “facadism” (humoristically defined in ArchDaily (2018) as “a practice vehe-
l
mently hated by many architects, it mostly consists of badly hiding a glass box behind a
skinned heritage building”), a superficial way of preserving heritage values;
l making new work recognizable and distinct from original elements, rather than a mimicry of
the original style; and
l finding a new use for the building that is compatible with its original use.
Adaptive reuse of buildings has a major role in sustainable development. When adap-
tive reuse involves historic buildings, environmental benefits are greater, as these
buildings have a lot to offer to the landscape, identity and amenity of the communities
they are located in.
One of the main environmental benefits of reusing buildings is the retention of the
original building’s “embodied energy” (defined as “the energy consumed by all of the
processes associated with the production of a building, from the acquisition of natural
resources to product delivery, including mining, manufacturing of materials and
equipment, transport and admin functions” (CSIRO, 1997). By reusing buildings, their
embodied energy is kept, making the project much more environmentally sustainable
than an entirely new construction. New buildings have much higher embodied energy
costs than buildings that are adaptively reused.
Embodied energy is also an economic value. Australian Government (2004) stated
for a specific project: “the combination of financial incentives and the commercially
oriented nature of the adaptive reuse schemes outweighed any extra heritage related
costs and project risks” and furthers that “these sympathetic adaptive reuse schemes
have created commercially viable investment assets for the owners.”
Reusing historic buildings has also social benefits for the surrounding communi-
ties. Adaptive reuse maintains the heritage meaning of a building and ensures its sur-
vival as a valued object, rather than falling into neglect and becoming unrecognizable
and forgotten.