Building Less Is a Design Decision
Transformation, reuse and the moment when not building is the best architectural choice.
Architecture likes new buildings.
They arrive without previous owners, without odd corners, without anything unexpected 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 starts somewhere between those two questions, generally after a disagreement.
Nothing new?
A brief often begins with the assumption that something must be built. More space is needed, standards have changed, the building no longer works. A new building looks like the clearest answer, and sometimes it is.
But before asking what to add, we look at what is there. Which spaces are useful. What is structurally sound. Where the real obstacles are. Whether the building is too small or simply badly organised. Whether rooms can be shared, connected or used differently.
The existing is not valuable because it is old. New construction is not irresponsible because it is new. Reuse is not a religion and architects are not conservation saints — a good deal of current reuse rhetoric is produced by offices that would build a tower tomorrow if asked politely.
It is a question of judgement. What stays, what can be repaired, what has to change, what is genuinely beyond saving. Demolition produces a very clean drawing and a very large pile of reality, so it belongs at the end of an argument rather than at the start of one.
The smallest large move
A small intervention can change how an entire building works. A lift makes every floor accessible. A new stair resolves orientation and escape routes at the same time. One opening brings daylight into a dark centre. A connecting volume turns two separate buildings into a single institution
At Europaschule Linz the 1950s school and the sports hall are retained and joined by a new volume. The addition holds what the existing buildings were missing and establishes a new centre for the school. Inside, selective openings, seating niches and widened corridor areas create new places for learning and exchange. Much of the existing structure remains. The project changes the school without pretending that nothing was there before.
The value of the addition is not only its own floor area. It is how much existing area it returns to use. Sometimes the most effective extension is a better entrance, a revised timetable or one wall removed in the right place — unimpressive from a helicopter, and considerably cheaper than the alternative.
Less building, more design
Transformation usually means more design work and less construction.
The existing structure has to be surveyed, understood and occasionally persuaded. Accessibility, fire safety, energy and building physics have to be integrated without destroying the qualities that made the building worth keeping in the first place. Standard details rarely fit without an argument. Fees, meanwhile, are calculated on construction cost, which is an elegant method of penalising the more difficult and more responsible option — a problem the profession discusses at conferences and then leaves exactly where it found it.
The result may be a project in which very little is visibly new. In a culture that still measures architecture by the size and recognisability of the object produced, this is awkward. But restraint is a design act. A project that reorganises use, repairs material and resolves a handful of critical points can create more durable value than full replacement. The architecture lies in knowing where intervention is necessary, and where it would only keep the architect occupied.
Not building is not the same as doing nothing. Doing nothing ignores the problem. Not building means understanding it well enough to solve it with less construction.
More than material
Existing buildings hold more than concrete, brick, timber and steel. A familiar entrance. A mature tree. A courtyard people have crossed for forty years. Rooms that belong to the collective memory of a place. They sit inside patterns of use and relationships that disappear quietly when a site is cleared, and for which nobody submits a claim.
Not everything has to remain, and not every trace deserves a commemorative plaque. But it should be understood before it is removed.
Transformation allows different periods to stay legible. New elements do not need to imitate the existing building, and they do not need to shout across it either. They can hold a clear relationship while accepting differences of material, construction and date. What we are after is neither a museum nor a new building wearing the old façade as a costume, but the next usable version of the building.
Everything becomes existing
Every new building becomes an existing building. Some manage it within a decade.
Designing for transformation is therefore not only a question for old structures. New buildings should also be able to survive their first programme. Clear structural systems, useful spans, accessible services and materials that can be repaired or separated make later change possible. Rooms should be specific enough to have character and not so specific that a change of timetable makes them useless.
A durable structure can carry several generations of interior. A façade can be repaired without dismantling the building. A school, an office or a housing project can absorb different uses without demolition at the first sign of change.
The most sustainable new building is rarely the one with the most technology. It is the one that does not have to be replaced when its first idea of the future turns out to be wrong.
Sometimes transformation means rebuilding extensively. Sometimes it means one precise addition. Sometimes it means repairing and reorganising what is already there — and sometimes it means putting the pencil down before the excavator arrives.