Building Less Is a Design Decision

Transformation, reuse and the moment when not building may be the better architectural choice.

Architecture likes new buildings.

They arrive without previous owners, strange corners or surprises behind the plaster. They produce clean drawings, clean photographs and very satisfying models.

Existing buildings are less polite.

They contain alterations nobody documented, structures that do not quite match the plans and services installed by someone’s uncle in 1987.

They also contain space, material, labour, energy and memory.

In our office, one of us usually asks: What can stay?

The other asks: What could this become?

We are not going to say who is who.

The project usually starts somewhere between those two questions, generally after a disagreement.

What is actually wrong?

A brief often begins with the assumption that something new needs to be built.

More space is required. Standards have changed. The existing building no longer works.

Sometimes a new building really is the sensible answer.

But before adding something, we try to understand what is already there.

Which rooms work? What is structurally sound? Where is the actual problem? Is the building genuinely too small, or simply badly organised? Could spaces be shared, connected or used differently?

The existing is not valuable simply because it is old.

And new construction is not irresponsible simply because it is new.

Reuse is not a religion.

It is a question of judgement: what can stay, what can be repaired, what needs to change, and what is genuinely beyond saving.

Demolition produces a wonderfully clean drawing and a very large pile of reality, so we prefer it at the end of an argument rather than at the beginning.

Small moves can be large

Sometimes one intervention changes an entire building.

A lift makes every floor usable.

A new stair can resolve orientation and escape routes at the same time.

One opening can bring daylight into a dark centre.

A connecting volume can turn two separate buildings into one institution.

At Europaschule Linz, the existing 1950s school and sports hall remain. A new volume connects them and introduces the spaces the old buildings were missing.

Selective openings, widened corridor areas and seating niches create places for learning and exchange without pretending the old school never existed.

The value of the addition is not simply the square metres it adds.

It is also the existing square metres it makes useful again.

Sometimes the most effective intervention is a better entrance, a new connection or one wall removed in the right place.

None of these is particularly impressive from a helicopter.

Fortunately, most people use buildings from the ground.

Less construction often means more design

Working with existing structures is rarely the easy option.

The building has to be measured, understood and occasionally persuaded.

Accessibility, fire safety, energy, acoustics and building physics need to be resolved within a structure designed for another time.

Standard details often stop being standard.

And then there is the slightly absurd professional problem that architectural fees are still often related to construction cost, meaning that the option involving less construction can require more design work and produce a smaller fee.

The profession has been discussing this for some time.

The problem has survived the discussion.

But the result can be architecture in which relatively little is visibly new.

We are comfortable with that.

The architectural decision may simply be knowing where an intervention matters and where another intervention would mainly keep the architect busy.

Not building is not the same as doing nothing.

Doing nothing ignores the problem.

Building less means understanding the problem well enough to know what is actually necessary.

Everything becomes existing

There is another reason this matters.

Every new building eventually becomes an existing building.

Some manage it surprisingly quickly.

So adaptability is not only a question for renovation projects.

Clear structural systems, useful spans, accessible services and repairable materials make future change easier. Rooms should have enough character to be good rooms, but not so much programme built into them that a new timetable makes them obsolete.

A school will change.

A household will change.

An office will change.

The building will probably still be standing there.

For us, durability therefore has less to do with predicting the future correctly than with leaving the future some room to disagree.

Sometimes transformation means extensive rebuilding.

Sometimes it means one precise addition.

Sometimes it means repairing and reorganising what is already there.

And occasionally it means putting the pencil down before the excavator arrives.