The world was does not belong only to humans, notwithstanding the deluded ravings of right wing religious extremists. We share it with a still unknown number of other species and most of them can be pretty awe inspiring once you get to know them better. What better way to spend your life than trying to [...]
There can be no doubt that urban agriculture is going to get more of our attention in the future but we draw the line at the adaptive reuse of entire city buildings for intensive urban farming, a dubious idea that seems to be yet another attempt to extend corporate control of food production, an issue [...]
All this dutch design brilliance may soon amount to nought. Approximately 60% of the Netherlands are lower than sea level, not a good place to be in a century where sea levels may well rise 5 metres or more. Many studies are pessimistic about the country’s survival while others are already planning for a floating [...]
We’re having a dutch day because last week Architectural Record announced its annual Design Vanguard for 2006 and one of the winners was the Rotterdam architectural firm BAR architects (yes even more crap flash animation). We had seen their bridge house but we didn’t know about several interesting adaptive reuse projects. The retirement home for [...]
The opponents of heritage conservation and adaptive reuse are usually overjoyed when a mishap like fire destroys a building on a site that they would rather see redeveloped as a big box shopping mall or something equally visionary. But sometimes all is not lost – the Parthenon for instance was blown up when being used [...]
Is it adaptive reuse if you find that simulacra can be used as the thing itself, if a film set of a house is lived in? Look at this story (via Digg) about Tunisians living in the houses built as Star Wars sets. All a bit Truman Show and as categorically tricky as transubstantiation. It’s [...]
We tend to be uninterested in adaptive reuse projects that are little more than renovations or restorations. It’s not that they are unworthy because they are extremely important – contemporary adaptive reuse is based on sustainability principles on the one hand and heritage conservation as a basic social building block on the other. It’s just [...]
It’s beautiful, but we can find very little about it. What we do know is that it is the adaptive reuse of Schloss Rothschild, Umbau, Austria as a museum by the Viennese Pritzker Prize winning architect Hans Hollein (who has an excellent website with NO FLASH!) and it is due to be finished in 2007. [...]
We’ve talked about spam before but this time it’s Spam, the real thing, if you can say that about Spam. The Spam Museum is in an adaptively reused K-Mart, appropriately enough. It’s in Austin, Minnesota, “otherwise known as Spam Town, USA” (but not to us). The museum also houses the offices of the Hormel Food [...]
It’s one thing to write about converting 747s into mansions but ultimately that’s only for an extremely wealthy minority. Homelessness is endemic throughout the world and in the US alone approximately 3.5 million people are estimated to experience homelessness at some point annually, a million of them children. Extremist right wing governments have exacerbated the [...]