BUILD NEW OR REUSE:
WHAT EDUCATORS ARE THINKING

Deborah Berke

We absolutely must teach reuse. In the 1980s, when people first started talking about sustainability, they added a course here, a course there; when computers were introduced, they put them in a room in the basement. I don’t think we should talk about reuse as this thing we add to the curriculum the way we added AutoCAD and Revit. It has to be fully integrated at every scale and through all the systems that make up a building, a community, infrastructure, and a neighborhood. 

Jeanne, while you and I both do a lot of adaptive reuse, there is something enormously exciting about doing a brand-new building—for all of us. I don’t think we should take that away from students. We need to do both.

Ned Crankshaw

It’s good for students to start out by thinking about shaping place and environment without a lot of constraint. Let them be wildly creative first, and then start introducing questions about responding to an existing environment or building. I think if we started students on reuse projects, they’d be so overwhelmed by the existing situation that it would be hard for them to exercise their own will. I’m okay with students graduating with the same degree, but having had different experiences. Maybe some have had a grounding in preservation or rehabilitation or reuse, and some have barely touched it. There’s a place for all of them. My personal ethic wants everybody to have some experience with reuse, but I also recognize that they won’t all gravitate to it.

David Fixler 

I do think reuse should be a required part of student education. Reuse teaches students how to assess, define, and extract value from any cultural resource—a monument, a building, a landscape. Every year the percentage of work that we do with existing assets increases. To get students used to that, they should be taking courses from the beginning that force them to engage with existing buildings, not just as abstractions, but as pieces of history, as well as formal and technical objects, so that they understand the interplay between their culture, design, and temporal value.

I think people need to be given the skills to create new buildings or landscapes as well. But they also have to be able to understand how a form can grow out of an existing resource, and how the two can interact and have meaning with one another. That is where I think your term “grafting” applies very well, Jeanne. People sort themselves out; some are going to be more natural at creating that initial form of a building and want to work with a clean slate, but the opportunities these days very often lie with existing assets. 

Francisco Javier Rodríguez-Suárez

I don’t think the curriculum should be focused on either existing buildings or building new. We’re doing both. We’re allowing the students to gravitate between different topics. 

There’s something valuable in cultivating a sensibility toward an existing building, form, or footprint—resignifying the memory, converting it toward desire, or creating a balance or a conversation between the two.

Nikole Bouchard

Whenever I’m given the opportunity to teach, I almost always base it on reuse. It requires as much imagination, if not more, to respond thoughtfully to an existing condition, as opposed to a tabula rasa scenario. Reuse requires students to see their built environment, which they may have preconceptions about, through a new lens. It cultivates a deep sense of curiosity, and a level of empathy with the material, building, and/or community they are working with.

Renee Chow

When we’re talking about climate change and resource conservation, teaching reuse is central to design education. Reuse at an architectural scale is to give new life to an existing structure. I don’t think this needs to be explicitly taught in architectural education. Designers are very good at reusing things. I propose, somewhat differently, that if we’re thinking in a multiscalar way, there’s always something that we are adapting and reusing. Learning to read that palimpsest takes training.

Cathi Ho Schar

I think what you’re getting at is this: Should an ethical foundation be built into the requirements for architectural education? I think educators would strongly agree that there is. This is core to the values, mission, and questions asked in higher education. 

BUILD NEW OR REUSE: 
WHAT EDUCATORS ARE TEACHING

Nikole

Reuse is not a requirement yet, but it’s definitely becoming more common, from the earlier design studios offered in undergraduate and graduate programs to the more advanced design studios. Mainly, these topics are taught in the option studios or seminars.

Deborah

At Yale, reuse is quasi-mandatory. In the fall 2023 semester, for the first time, we decided to base the third-semester core studio of our three-year MArch [master of architecture] program on adaptive reuse plus addition—meaning the assignment was to work with an existing structure and design a new addition for it. Some students are reusing and adding onto the old building. Some are eating it with their new structure. Others are very delicately kissing the building with their new structure. It’s been great for students because you get old and new in the same project. I also try to have one advanced studio be some version of reuse. 

David

At the GSD, reuse is not a requirement, but more and more people are offering reuse studios—taking existing buildings and creating interesting programs and studies around them. I sense that with this growing interest, things will start to coalesce into more formalized programs.

Ned We don’t mandate reuse in the curriculum, but we sort of coax and cajole and create an ethos. Teaching reuse is pretty central here, but it’s not a dominant thing that’s got to be an ingredient everywhere. 

Francisco

We treat reuse not just as a tangential or elective component of our curriculum, but one that is at the very center of what we’re doing, both in undergrad and grad. In 2023, in the fourth-year core studios, students were working on Roosevelt Island, on the historic hospital there. In the last couple of years, we’ve had almost 10 adaptive reuse graduate option studios. 

Renee

Our studios that offer design explorations in reuse are all in demand. Visiting professors Rossana Hu and Lyndon Neri taught a reuse studio recently. This was hugely popular, but I don’t know if it was reuse or Rossana and Lyndon that made it popular! 

An emphasis on the multiscalar is something we’re still building on. Our college was founded on connecting the three disciplines of architecture, landscape, and planning, but we haven’t found all the bridges we need. Reuse, in the sense of reuse of a structure all the way to reuse of a city, isn’t as active a part of the pedagogy as I would like.

Stephen  Schreiber

Despite the fact that something like 50 percent of archi- tects’ work is in buildings that already exist, my colleagues and I couldn’t think of any professional architecture programs that particularly focus on reuse—even ones in New York City where almost all of the work is in reuse. 

Jeffrey Day

I also don’t know of any architecture program that makes reuse a regular part of their curriculum. We don’t collect data about the unique ways that programs meet the NAAB Conditions; we only have data about pass rates for each condition.

BARRIERS TO INTEGRATING
REUSE INTO CURRICULA

Nikole

It takes conversations among faculty to discuss the arc of the curriculum sequence from a program’s start to finish, to best understand what exactly is happening in every course of every year—to meaningfully address the pedagogical strengths, weaknesses, and gaps that occur. In my experience, it’s hard to get everyone together for a focused full-day conversation. I don’t think there’s resistance to reuse in terms of the faculty’s attitude. Several of our faculty are approaching adaptive reuse from a variety of perspectives. It’s exciting and inspiring—we simply need to share our ideas and approaches more consistently and comprehensively. 

Francisco

One barrier is the speed of things today versus a few decades ago, when some of us were educated. It’s hard enough for the big, slow, and bureaucratic public institutions like mine to digest change. And things are happening sometimes not because of us, but in spite of our best intentions. How do we make decisions about curricula that are not going through a multiyear process? I think the other problem is that some colleagues prefer not to rock the boat during the time they are leading architecture programs. That usually results in stagnation, especially in these times when innovation moves at a different speed.

Renee

I don’t think that there’s anything preventing more studios from being about reuse, except the breadth of things that already have to be covered relative to accreditation. 

Ned

I don’t see many barriers: we have a school that is connected to our place, Lexington, and our region. Students care about cultural stories here—we don’t have to make policy statements or make an ethos of reuse obligatory in any way. It also gets introduced in how we hire faculty members.

Cathi

Our Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture conferences, journals, and awards reflect the growing faculty work that centers on adaptive and reparative pedagogies and practices. The challenge is the integration of this across education, accreditation, and licensure, and with our allied disciplines, to see broader impacts.

THE CHALLENGE AND THE
PROMISE OF ACCREDITATION

Deborah

I think the introduction of reuse into accreditation requirements will eventually come. If reuse were a criterion for accreditation, just like sustainability or software skills, you could integrate it into the structures course, into the MEP [mechanical, electrical, and plumbing] and building systems course, into a site-planning or community-based course. And maybe have it be in the studio sequence so that you have to work with an existing building or next door to one or some version of that. That’s much better than sticking a new course into the curriculum. That just won’t work at any school. Everybody needs to do this, and do it together.

Ned

I don’t know if NAAB accreditation can tell us how to teach people to care. That has to be part of our college’s culture. What you care about is not just exercising your own dream, but thinking about humanity writ large—the humanity of individual people and the places in which they’ll live. If you care about that, you’ll care about how we use our resources, and you’ll care about creating places that are rich and diverse. 

Francisco

I don’t think schools feel like they are getting value from the NAAB accreditation process. The system really needs to change.

Renee

There is a degree to which accreditation culturally controls what we do. The organization has a very limited view of how much you should be exploring at school. I understand they’re making sure that we’re addressing health, safety, and welfare, but as a result, architectural education is stuck in a middle ground.

Around 10 to 15 years ago, we introduced building reuse in an integrated studio. A student would start with the building shell and then look at all the systems and adapt them as part of the design integration. We were told by NAAB then that building reuse did not fulfill the criterion—we were required to demonstrate integration with a new building. As a result, reuse sort of dropped out of the curriculum until the last few years.

Stephen

NAAB has been out in the front of some great ideas that cause schools to change. NAAB criteria are modified on a regular schedule, every eight years at the Accreditation Review Forum. The next one is in 2027. Practitioners, academics, regulators, students, and other interested parties basically brainstorm changes in the profession and academy, and try to predict the trends to get in front of. They decide what should and shouldn’t be taught in school versus practice, and try to have the leanest possible set of conditions. 

Jeffrey

The current 2020 NAAB Conditions don’t mention reuse specifically by name, but there are Conditions that relate to environmental stewardship and climate change. We don’t specify how a program should meet the Conditions, however. It is conceptually possible for a program to meet all of the NAAB Conditions through course content based on adaptive reuse. Programs meet the same Condition in very different ways. 

Stephen

NAAB programs are taking students from zero to being able to think and act like an architect in a very short period of time. There’s a lot to learn. I think that post-professional programs or master of science degrees in architecture may be a place to specialize or focus on reuse.

Jeffrey

In order to make reuse an explicit NAAB Condition, there would need to be advocates from the profession, the academy, or the student body pushing for inclusion during the next Accreditation Review Forum. It would help to have representatives from the different collateral organizations such as the American Institute of Architects and the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards promoting reuse. The things that rise to the top end up making it into the new iteration of the Conditions and Procedures when these are approved by the NAAB Board, and I wouldn’t be surprised if adaptive reuse became a strong contender. There are also NAAB’s shared values; these are not specific program or student criteria, but overarching conditions that require programs to demonstrate their unique approach to compliance. These could be rewritten to require something like reuse, but it would take advocates from the different aspects of the discipline to make this happen.

SYMPATHIES AND DIFFERENCES:
REUSE AND HISTORIC PRESERVATION PEDAGOGY

Nikole

It’s been interesting to see the difference between the way our school’s Historic Preservation Institute addresses adaptive reuse and the way that I, and some of my colleagues, might approach it. At the moment, the institute is much more invested in 3D scanning and replicating what was once there. It’s really fun to work with students who bring a different kind of knowledge and expertise to the table, and to see how they use it, or perhaps misuse it, in exciting or unexpected ways. Ultimately, students can decide what path within adaptive reuse and historic preservation they want to pursue. 

Deborah

I used to think that historic preservationists were the bad guys because they prevented us from making the changes we needed to make and having fun and being sort of playful with what we were transforming. But Jorge Otero-Pailos, the head of the historic preservation program at GSAPP [the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia University], is completely changing it, so it’s much more a program about reuse. It’s a shame that they are isolated from the architects . . . I’m all for more integration.

Ned

One interesting thing is that we offer a historic preservation undergraduate certificate, and it mostly enrolls architecture undergraduate students. That gives you a sense that the architecture students seem to be really interested in reuse. They’re getting ideas straight from the preservationists, which they’re able to bring into their studio, whether the studio was intentionally about reuse or not. 

Renee

We have been exploring a certificate in adaptation and reuse. Since we don’t currently offer courses in preservation, our hope is to develop a multidisciplinary and multiscalar program that looks at everything from materials, to buildings, to neighborhoods as palimpsests for adaptation, emphasizing the sustainability benefits and foregrounding the financial paths. We are planning to test market interest next year. 

David

One of the problems with preservation—which is one of the reasons why nobody at the GSD uses the word—is that it’s often seen as restrictive. You’re being blocked from doing this or doing that because it’s a historic building. I teach my version of conservation adaptive reuse as an opportunity. You have these wonderful resources out there that present creative opportunities for making environmentally sound solutions. There’s a very interesting quote by British architect Bernard Feilden—one of the eminent figures of the whole conservation movement. He said, “You become a good architect first, then you can be a conservation architect.” 

Francisco

I’ve been practicing in Old San Juan, in Puerto Rico, for quite some time; its buildings have been there for centuries. There was a conscious effort to preserve the city, but now the new generation is saying that they’re not only going to preserve or imitate it, they’re also going to resignify it, to bring in an element that is going to play and engage in a dialogue with what’s there. It was a difficult process of educating government institutions.

WHY EDUCATORS CARE ABOUT REUSE

Francisco

When I attended the GSD in the 1990s, I remember a studio with Mohsen Mostafavi. We had the option of keeping the site’s existing building. Back then, I was like, “Of course I’m not keeping it!” I wanted to design a sexy little thing on the whole site. When I look back now, I say, “What was I thinking?” I missed an opportunity to engage in a conversation with the site’s history, to engage the architecture in a poetic sense, in a dialogue between memory and desire. 

Nikole

Reuse really hit home when I traveled the world in 2009 as a Steedman Fellow, looking at the ways in which various cultures build in remote landscapes and use the materials and tools they have at hand. I was blown away to see the incredibly resourceful ways in which people were building, whether it was rammed-earth buildings or acting as a bricoleur, collecting whatever materials were within arm’s reach. When I returned to the US, I thought there’s got to be better ways in which we can work with what’s around us and be more critical of the implications our design and construction decisions have on our landscapes, environment, and planet. 

When I started teaching in Milwaukee, I was taken by the postindustrial structures all over the city. Some had been reinhabited, but many were sitting vacant and idle—decaying quickly over time—or slated for demolition. Milwaukee is a place with so much potential for reuse projects—it all made sense to make this the focus of my pedagogical pursuits.

David

I came from a scholarly rather than technical background. I grew up more as an architectural historian. I just love the dialogue, the talking back and forth across time to the people who originally created and experienced these buildings. It’s not, “Oh, what would Kahn do, or what would Le Corbusier do?” It’s more like, “How do I have an intelligent dialogue? How do I design something that can be understood as a logical outgrowth?” 

In my first few years of practice, mostly with Perry Dean Rogers Partners, I wasn’t doing preservation, but they had a strong tradition of working with existing buildings. As I matured with the practice, I started doing more of that and really discovered a niche. But that was after having gone through an apprenticeship, doing primarily new buildings. 

Ned

I got interested in historic preservation and cultural landscape preservation as an undergraduate. I was mostly interested in the cultural and storytelling capacity of places. But with our climate situation, I’ve gotten a lot more interested in the energy that goes into the production of materials, damage to sites, and the preservation of the living environment.

Renee

I firmly believe that differences in the environment that reflect our differences of culture, microclimate, or topography are important. I was educated at MIT at a time when Team 10 was a critical influence, and so to talk about modernism in its locality was the value system that was ingrained in me. I haven’t found any reason to believe that isn’t important to the way we should design the environment going forward. That’s why I began by saying there is always something we are reusing—every project reuses and adapts a larger context.

Deborah

On one level my interest is personal. My mom was a frugal Yankee who saved everything and put everything to use again. I feel as though I almost have that genetically—that the right way to be on earth is to not waste and to be creative about how you use things. The second reason is that I grew up in New York in a time when artists were moving into loft buildings. New York has always been a tear-it-down city, but there was a lot more reuse of old buildings when I was coming up. I would also say when I started teaching, now a long time ago, I was really a contrarian. The people I was teaching with were only doing new structures. I thought, “I’m just going to be cranky and different; we’re going to reuse an old building in the design studio I’m teaching.”

WHY MIGHT STUDENTS CARE ABOUT REUSE? 

Nikole

In general, this generation is very aware of issues of carbon-neutral design and climate change. Many of our students grew up in Wisconsin, in and around these postindustrial spaces and infrastructures that hold such latent potential. Students have seen the different ways the city can change—for better and for worse. They want to participate and make a positive impact. 

David

One of the reasons why students are so interested is precisely because of carbon capture and not throwing things away: the Lacaton & Vassal approach where you don’t demolish anything unless you absolutely have to. Iconic buildings generate a lot of interest, but so do more anonymous buildings.

Francisco

Students today understand that a lot of their work will be dealing with existing buildings as opposed to buildings that plop like a spaceship onto a particular site. I also think they’re less competitive, less about ego.

Deborah

Students are very interested for several reasons: the environment—there’s a big interest in being able to calculate a saved carbon footprint. When students see architects like Lacaton & Vassal turning down work because it doesn’t do what they do, they think, “That’s cool.” Artists, like Theaster Gates, also make reuse cool. Students, more than my generation, understand that we need to take care of what we have. They’re reusing stuff with a kind of pride that hasn’t been around since the late 1960s.