Idea

Adaptive reuse in architecture

179 buildings

Adaptive reuse gives an existing building a new purpose instead of pulling it down. It avoids the cost of demolition and keeps the energy already spent on the original building. An old building can also be mined for materials for new projects, and it keeps a community's link to its past. The usual hurdles are structure and building codes, so a condition survey decides whether a project works.

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The Musée d'Orsay in Paris (1986) fills a former railway station, whose glazed barrel vault now shelters stepped stone gallery terraces. Lina Bo Bardi's SESC Pompéia in São Paulo (1986) keeps a drum factory as a leisure centre and adds concrete towers linked by bridges. Tate Modern in London (2000) turned a power station into a gallery, and its Turbine Hall became an indoor street. The High Line in New York (2009) is a park on an abandoned elevated railway. Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town (2017) carves a grain silo into an atrium shaped like a single grain of corn. These adaptive reuse examples show what to keep and where a new cut can open the old structure.

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