As Found: Experiments in Preservation

Text by Sofie De Caigny, Hülya Ertas and Bie Plevoets

As Found: Experiments in Preservation, was published to accompany the exhibition of the same name held at the Flanders Architecture Institute between September 2023 and March 2024. The book looks at the developing relationship between contemporary design and heritage and focuses on seven experimental approaches in preservation today: ensemble, void, reconfiguration, inside out, traces, mirror and nuance. These strategies are explored through essays, realised projects and international references.

We present here an extract from the introductory text from the book together with selected photography from the Belgian precedents included in the publication.

Introduction

‘Arrange whatever pieces come your way.’ Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary

For a long time, the relation between contemporary architecture and heritage was a discussion mainly held in professional circles. Public opinion stirred when important, visually prominent buildings were either mutilated or demolished, or when new constructions overshadowed historic buildings. Today, that debate has become wide open. From a disciplinary and technical question about how architecture should deal with its own memory, the question of what to do with existing buildings has evolved into a broad challenge that touches on many social domains. It is now no longer enough to discuss how to intervene (or not) in historic buildings. Prompted by social, economic, cultural and ecological urgencies, a care-based approach to the existing heritage in the broad sense is appropriate.

In this project, the Flanders Architecture Institute and Hasselt University want to explore new attitudes towards the given bullding stock. We do so by means of the As Found exhibition at De Singel in Antwerp, the academic symposium As Found: Internatonal Colloquium on Adaptive Reuse' at Hasselt University, and an educational project with different architects, policymakers, users, financiers and clients to adopt new approaches to dealing with existing buildings. We also want to make a wider audience aware of the power and opportunities we have as a society when we treat the current building stock with care. Buildings and places bear the traces of collective and individual stories. Cherishing them provides something to hold onto and can promote cohesion in communities.

Empathy for Existing Buildings: From the Margin to Leitmotif in Education, Design Practice and Policy

The increased attention for ‘what exists already’ in urban and rural fabrics is fuelled by a convergence of diverse developments. First, the view of the past is broadening undeniably. This provides space to look at history from diverse perspectives. It is no longer only stories of solitary heroes that are being passed on; the less glorious aspects of history are also open for discussion. Such an exercise is not easy, as the difficult social debate on the contextualization of certain statues in the public space shows. This broadened reading of the past also has an impact on the question of which existing buildings should be preserved and how that can be done most appropriately. More and more citizens are making their voices heard on this issue. After all, buildings are material relics that bear silent witness to the past. They carry the collective memory of places, often across generations. Non-canonical buildings that may not stand out spontaneously from an architectural-historical point of view can hold very important meanings for a community.

Among the sociocultural motives for looking differently at the existing building stock we must undoubtedly include the fact that heritage can provide something to hold onto in a rapidly changing world. Digitization and new technologies are swiftly transforming all areas of society. At the same time, globalization, migration, new family structures and forms of living together are putting normative conventions under pressure. Existing buildings sometimes turn out to be surprisingly well suited to new forms of community or programmes. Well-known examples include collective housing forms in manor houses in the countryside, or the lofts that developed in old industrial buildings because artists could combine their work and living space there.

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In urban planning, it is now widely accepted that when an urban fabric is composed of different time layers, its qualities increase along with quality of life there. As early as 1961, Jane Jacobs showed that diversity in urban neighbourhoods contributes to the quality of life of its inhabitants. She was not only talking about mixed buildings in terms of scale and function, but also the age of buildings. Richard Sennett reinforced that idea in 2018. Sustainable and liveable cities, he argued, are cities that can be repaired. That reparation can take different forms, such as restoration, adjustment and reconfiguration, according to the problems or needs of its inhabitants. Whereas in the 2000s in the Netherlands, programmes such as Projectbureau Belvedere actively raised awareness among designers and clients of the added value of historical layers and relics in developments in cities, villages and the landscape, this is now commonplace.

In a densely built-up region like Flanders where open space is scarce, the densification and redevelopment of existing sites is increasingly the order of the day. Restoring, infilling and reactivating the existing is not just a cultural decision about how the present and future relate to the past. It also has an impact on global flows of materials, local employment linked to crafts, and the promotion of manufacturing. Indeed, repairing, restoring and adapting buildings requires skills and knowledge of local materials. Increased restoration of buildings contributes to workforce training and local (craft) industries. Moreover, a care-based approach to the existing patrimony affects the whole metabolism of building the city. ‘Urban mining’, for example, involves upgrading materials that until recently were dismissed as waste from construction sites into raw materials for building projects. The chain can hardly get any shorter than that.

All these reasons explain why a growing part of the architects’ practice is focused on transformation instead of new construction. Social conditions are forcing a paradigm shift in how the existing patrimony is viewed. The dream of the tabula rasa or the blank page that dominated architectural education and practice well into the twentieth century seems to have been given up for good. The idea that designers start from a full page is accepted increasingly widely. This has far-reaching implications for issues in the discipline of architecture. For instance, existing buildings challenge aesthetic codes and the penchant for perfection. Adopting a phased approach and factoring in future transformations are gaining in importance. Also, the notion of authorship itself is becoming diffuse precisely because it is spread across generations. After all, many design decisions have already been taken by designers or workers who contributed earlier to the building, not by the contemporary architect.

The new guiding principle that reparation or transformation is always preferable to demolition and new construction or to occupying unaffected space initially developed mainly in the margins of the design and construction world. Architects who gave themselves significant cultural mandates seemed to pioneer this position initially. They were often supported in this by architecture critics and curators. The Flanders Architecture Institute dedicated a Festival of Architecture to it in 2017. On this occasion, we published Onvoltooid Verleden, a pamphlet with nine theses that sparked the debate on the relation between architecture and heritage among a wide audience. Architecture schools are also integrating transformation and reuse into their curricula. For instance, a project with students at the Academie van Bouwkunst in Amsterdam between 2014 and 2019 resulted in the book Re-Writing Architecture, a collection that highlights different design positions as to how to deal with the existing patrimony. Transformation as the first design choice has become increasingly institutionalized in recent years. Major international guiding frameworks such as the 2018 Davos Declaration and the European Commission’s New European Bauhaus underline this focus on buildings as bearers of the collective memory, the need for craft training and development, and the added value of having buildings of different ages in cities and villages.

NOTES

Many thanks to Sofie De Caigny and Egon Verleye from Vlaams Architectuurinstituut for their help with compiling this post. The book, As Found: Experiments in Preservation, can be purchased here.

Published 18th April 2024.