The Most Sustainable Building is The One You Don't Build
Paul Osmond, my Master program director at UNSW, was the first one who told me this interesting statement in one of his lecture last semester: "The Most Sustainable Building is The One You Don't Build!". The reason is pretty simple. Building new things requires energy and releases emissions. From sustainability point of view, embodied energy and embodied carbon produced from new building construction can be seen as the contributors to negative environmental impacts and to the climate change. Therefore, when it comes to the utilization of the built environment (and sustainability in general), the best option is to use already available buildings and improve their performance instead of building new ones.
Adaptive reuse is the most appropriate strategy in this context. Adaptive reuse can be defined as "a process that changes a disused or ineffective item into a new item that can be used for a different purpose" (Department of the Environment and Heritage 2004). The concept of adaptive reuse is broad and can be implemented in different applications at different scales. However, I'll focus my review on building's adaptive reuse in this post.
There are a number of benefits of using existing unused buildings for different purpose instead of building new ones. As I mentioned previously, from environmental point of view, adaptive reuse can save embodied energy and embodied carbon. From social perspective, adaptive reuse "can restore and maintain the heritage significance of a building and help to ensure its survival" (Department of the Environment and Heritage 2004). From economic perspective, it is obvious that adaptive reuse contributes to significant financial savings due to the fact that construction cost can be avoided.
Paddington Reservoir Gardens (tzg.com.au)
A great example of adaptive reuse is a nearby place from my campus, Paddington Reservoir Gardens designed by Tonkin Zulaikha Greer (TZG) Architects. The project is a conversion of old unused reservoir in Paddington, Sydney into a park. It now serves as an exciting public recreation space with sunken garden and pond and the original 19th century structures being displayed. The project won a number of awards including the 2011 Urban Land Institute Award for excellence: Asia-Pacific; the 2010 WAN Urban Design Award; and the 2010 International Architecture Award.
Tate Modern Art Museum (photo by Diego Delso)
Another globally recognized example of successful adaptive reuse is the conversion of former oil-fired Bankside Power Station into Tate Modern Art Museum in London, UK. The building was originally built as a highly unsustainable coal-fired power station before it was redesigned to be the first oil-fired power station in Britain. In 1992, a design competition was held to build a new building for modern art on the unused power station site. Adaptive reuse design from Herzog & de Meuron won the competition by reinventing the existing building instead of demolishing it.
In conclusion, adaptive reuse is more preferable compared to new construction from many different aspects: economically, socially and environmentally. This statement applies broadly and not only limited to buildings. The idea of reusing any unused items for different purpose means that they are treated as resource instead of waste (circular system).
References:
Department of the Environment and Heritage 2004, Adaptive Reuse: Preserving our past, Building our future, Department of the Environment and Heritage, Canberra, <http://www.environment.gov.au/system/files/resources/3845f27a-ad2c-4d40-8827-18c643c7adcd/files/adaptive-reuse.pdf>
Diego Delso, CC BY-SA 4.0, <https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=35491705>
