Adapting the Architect
repositioning the architect for existing buildings
As an architect, if you express an interest in existing buildings you may quickly be presented with a choice. This choice revolves around how you define yourself and consequently how your architecture community will try to confine you. It typically falls into two discrete buckets.
The first bucket elevates the nostalgic — the preservation architect. This is an identity of an architect who lives more in the past than present. A cliché of a preservation architect may insist that hand-drawn documentation remains better than any contemporary computer-aided design drawing. A preservation architect may be viewed as seeking to restore architecture to a previous golden age — preserving or restoring the building while sanitizing the unpleasant social forces that made that particular building possible. A preservation architect may often be perceived as antagonistic to the position of a modern architect who strives to produce new, high-art architecture.
The second bucket is a little more blasé. It may be best described as the developer architect — more kitsch than high-art, appealing to the universal popularity of awnings, uplighting, and upscale cafes. This second bucket is less loaded than the preservationist bucket (unless it veers into the realm of post-modern architecture), but it is nonetheless limiting in impact. The developer architect may be hard to take seriously. If they craft a beautiful space, it is viewed as lucky. If they orchestrate a procession that attracts droves of people, it is viewed as the latest example of conspicuous consumption. The developer architect possesses many of the same skills and interests as the high-art architect but ultimately, because of their medium of existing buildings, they are seen as something less — lacking in either vision or innovation.
What if there were another bucket — something outside the cliché or blasé? This bucket would require a fresh definition of existing buildings. Instead of seeing existing buildings as either relics of the past or as useful commercial fabric, perhaps they could be seen more simply — in terms of their physical properties: complex, refined, ordered sets of materials. Through this definition we can introduce a new bucket — the resource architect. Unlike the preservation architect, the resource architect is concerned with tomorrow. The resource architect operates in the near future — sculpting space for the forces that she can see shaping our society five or ten years out. Unlike the developer architect, the resource architect seeks to inspire and uplift, but does so in such a way as to minimize the use of new building materials — the lightest material touch for the highest human impact. Through this lens, the resource architect may be able to stand toe to toe with the high-art architect but she should be ready for the quick rebuttal. The high-art architect enjoys his privileged status as taste-maker and arbiter of style. In order to preserve his place, he may quickly conjure up calculations of carbon that show that in fact his architecture, the architecture of new buildings, is the cleanest and greenest of them all. Faced with these facts, the resource architect may question the relevancy of her material-focused approach, but I recommend that she hold her ground. The facts, when viewed in a broader context, tell a more complex story of our collective resource consumption.
The truth is that we have already built a lot of buildings — and the general size of those buildings has had a tendency to increase.[1] To be more specific, during the last two decades of my career as an architect, more efficient new lighting and space heating solutions have reduced energy consumption of commercial buildings by more than 15% on a square foot basis. New buildings by and large are more efficient. However during that same period the amount of total commercial building square footage grew by 25%.[2] Our gains in efficiency are being outpaced by our gains in growth. I would argue that some of this can be explained by our tendency to celebrate the new and the high-art architect who champions the new. Or I could argue that it reflects the risk-averse nature of the commercial real estate industry that is more likely to invest in simpler, “clean-shaven” new buildings than to contend with all the “hair” that might be on an existing building. In general, I favor heuristics over arguments. Our collective problem is how to lessen our impact and rewild our world.
New technologies, new buildings, new materials all have a role to play in lessening our impact, but they must be taken in context. The context is that we have more people and more square feet per person (both commercial and residential) than previous generations. The impact of our built environment on our natural environment is growing, not shrinking despite all the recent improvements in efficiency. In order to reduce, we will also have to reuse.
This broader context is a friend to the resource architect. Evaluation of existing buildings is going to become an ever-increasingly powerful tool for the resource architect. Understanding what we have already built and seeing fresh creative opportunities in it takes time, focus, and reward. We need to reward the resource architect and her cohort of resource engineers as we reward the high-art architect. We need to support new technologies that decrease the cost of evaluating and documenting existing buildings so they can be understood as quickly and accurately as a blank site plan. If we can get past our inherent bias toward new solutions to solve perennial problems, we will see a whole new era of lessening our impact through the reuse of existing buildings. Along the way, we can find a new position in our community for the architect who loves existing buildings.
[1] “Commercial buildings have gotten larger in the United States, with implications for energy”, U.S. Energy Administration, December 3, 2020 — link
[2] “Energy Efficiency Impact Report”, Clay Nesler, Alliance to Save Energy,Lisa Jacobson, Business Council for Sustainable Energy, Steve Nadel, American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, 2018 — link
[3] In 1976, Congress passed the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act to increase recycling and conservation efforts as waste became a bigger problem. It is estimated that the slogan “reduce, reuse, recycle” was born at this time, reference: The Story Behind “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle”, Pantheon Enterprises
