Reuse and Repair
Put the city up; tear the city down,
put it up again; let us find a city.
—Carl Sandburg, “The Windy City,” 1922.1
Chicago was a well-loved subject of writer Carl Sandburg. Committed to the working class, his poems vividly recount the people who labored to make and remake the city during its heady period of growth in the 1910s and 1920s: the “shovel stiffs” and “work plugs” breathing life into “the junk of the earth” in rounds of “Shoveling, / Wrecking, / Planning, / Building, breaking, rebuilding.”2 This cacophony of construction and demolition stemmed in part from burgeoning housing and commercial demand, as well as the ongoing civic improvements of Burnham and Bennett’s 1909 urban plan.3 But it was accelerated by architectural obsolescence, a new real estate concept born in New York City that reached a fever pitch in Chicago. As Daniel M. Abramson describes in his essay for this issue, new federal taxes incentivized owners to demolish “obsolete” buildings as young as 13 years old and replace them with more up-to-date—and therefore more desirable and profitable—new structures on the same site. This radical construction-demolition cycle initially frightened architects and the public, who were accustomed to large buildings being permanent. Yet, Abramson writes, it soon became accepted as “a process of seemingly inevitable innovation, expendability, and progress.” Witnessing this watershed cultural change, Sandburg came to characterize the city as a place where buildings went up and down as naturally as the sun.
One hundred years later, Sandburg’s appeal to “let us find a city” feels as urgent and resonant as ever. As an architect and a historian, we know that making urban places is a never-ending process, as needs, desires, beliefs, and populations are always shifting. Yet we also recognize the grave environmental consequences of the endless construction-demolition cycle that in Sandburg’s time seemed full of promise. The building sector currently produces 31 percent of annual global carbon emissions and accounts for one of the largest components of municipal waste in many countries.4 As we work to reduce the industry’s outsized contribution to the climate crisis and its excessive resource use, how can we simultaneously ensure our cities stay alive and responsive to their inhabitants? How can we find greater equality and pleasure in living together as communities while also living more lightly on the earth?
Reuse and renovation offer one potent path forward. They save between 50 and 75 percent of embodied carbon emissions compared to new construction.5 Governments and institutions worldwide increasingly recognize this environmental significance and are enacting numerous incentives and regulations to encourage reuse and curb the building industry’s carbon pollution. Yet the architectural profession—as well as the schools that populate its ranks—continue to promote the notion that creating brand-new buildings is the most valuable and creative form of architectural expression. Architects who design formally distinctive buildings from scratch have long been rewarded with more lucrative commissions and accolades. The root of this reluctance to view reuse and repair as legitimate forms of design is chronicled in an essay by Eric P. Mumford. Still, growing interest within the architecture and planning fields about the reuse, repair, and reinvention of what already exists is evidenced by the troves of recent conferences, exhibitions, and publications on the topic.6 Major architecture prizes are recognizing reuse projects, too.7
This issue of Harvard Design Magazine seeks to develop and expand this increasingly vital movement, engaging reuse across multiple scales—from individual buildings to downtown streets and the regulatory frameworks that organize our cities. Highlighting creative and interdisciplinary thinking, the issue promotes the act of bringing new life to what already exists as a powerful brief for designers, their clients, and the communities they serve. We bring designers and planners together with mayors, educators, artists, and scholars from fields including urban and architectural history, disability studies, sociology, and ethnography.
The theme of the issue nods to the ubiquitous slogan, “reduce, reuse, recycle,” from the United States’ first national recycling programs in the 1970s. Although it originated from a grassroots movement to address mounting waste in post-war American cities, the slogan also had the effect of shifting that responsibility onto consumers, rather than the producers of throw-away packaging. Fifty years later, our theme—“Reuse and Repair”—channels some of the same urgency but focuses it through a more critical lens on the built environment’s complex technical, cultural, and political dimensions. Offering “Reuse and Repair” as a pair of concepts to encourage thinking around how systemic change might be enacted, we aim to open a conversation about how designing toward a low-carbon future can go hand-in-hand with the wider work of caring for and remaking our cities and society.
Common themes have emerged. Reuse has long challenged strict notions of architectural authorship, exposing how design is often an asynchronous and collaborative process involving different architects, inhabitants, and many other stakeholders over time. Chris Cornelius offers a framework rooted in Indigenous values that asks us to consider how our design choices would change if we regard buildings and landscapes as our relatives. An example of asynchronous collaboration can be seen in a new design we commissioned for a languishing public pavilion on Chicago’s lakefront. Originally designed by the architects Ultramoderne and structural engineer Brett Schneider for the 2015 Chicago Architecture Biennial, its inventive reinterpretation by the architectural office Kwong Von Glinow exemplifies the promise of a collaborative approach to architectural practice as buildings age.
Compelling cases of reuse also show that the most lasting buildings are often those most open to change. Brian D. Goldstein reflects on the work of influential Black architect J. Max Bond Jr., whose flexible housing designs allowed people to make the world in their own image, even if much in that world was otherwise denied to them. David Gissen and Georgina Kleege bring a disability perspective to Philip Johnson’s canonical Glass House, exploring adaptations Johnson made to accommodate his own impairments—a history that has been suppressed in favor of architectural ideals about bodies and homes. Revisiting her childhood home in Josep Lluís Sert’s Peabody Terrace at Harvard, Imani Perry recalls how the complex’s Brutalist architecture “‘worked’ well . . . even when it didn’t seem to.” Welcoming “a spectrum of Black life,” its design helped imbue her early years with a sense of community that endures.
If reuse offers an alternative to traditional notions of architecture as a single-authored, top-down pursuit, access to it is not equally available to all. In Detroit, Sharon Cornelissen surveys white middle-class newcomers who have been hard at work repairing “abandoned” homes, but who are nonetheless shielded by “the privilege to be forgetful about dispossession, expropriation, and the neighborhood’s past.” Elsewhere in the Rust Belt, we hear from Mayor Jamael Tito Brown of Youngstown, Ohio—a city still struggling 50 years after the steel industry’s collapse—about the near-Sisyphean task of reuse and repair at an urban scale.
Rebuilding after catastrophic events prompted our contributors to question reuse’s limits. When fires raged through Los Angeles early this year, residents returned to unsafe air, land, and homes. Christopher Hawthorne moderates a revealing conversation about the implications of reuse for public health and community rebuilding. Reframing today’s crises as the rule rather than the exception, Eve Blau leads a conversation exploring reconstruction in war-torn Ukraine, suggesting that in an age of continuous disruption, building and rebuilding are becoming increasingly indistinguishable.
Certain building styles provoke strong public responses, and so campaigning for their reuse requires careful explication of their encoded histories, cultures, and ideas. Concrete modernism is one example. Considering buildings fatally caught between the cutting-edge present and the idealized past, Roberto Fabbri explores the complexities surrounding the preservation and demolition of modernist concrete structures from the 1960s and 1970s in the Gulf states. Back in the United States, the classical architectural styles favored in the Executive Order “Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture” aligns with moves to tear down Washington, DC’s Brutalist buildings. Angela M. Person reflects on the fact that, time and again, this oft-maligned style gains new appreciation when treated with care and imagination.
As resistance to viewing the reuse and repair of buildings as a legitimate form of design wanes, the appeal at the heart of Sandburg’s poem—“let us find a city”—is hopefully capturing the attention of future generations. This issue asks: If we free ourselves from the inherited limits on design practice, what new kinds of architecture, cities, and ways of being might we create?
Recent publications include Charlotte Malterre-Barthe’s A Moratorium on New Construction (Sternberg Press, 2025); Jeanne Gang’s The Art of Architectural Grafting (Park Books, 2024); ARCH+’s “The Great Repair” (2023); and Deborah Berke and Thomas de Monchaux’s Transform (Monacelli, 2023). For monographs, atlases, and handbooks published between 1999–2022, see Francesca Lanz and John Pendlebury, “Adaptive reuse: a critical review,” The Journal of Architecture 27, nos. 2–3 (2022).
Recent and forthcoming conferences include “From Adaptive Reuse to Adaptive Architecture” (Azrieli School of Architecture & Urbanism, Carleton University, 2026); “Repairing Architecture Schools” (Columbia University GSAPP and Places Journal, 2024); “As Found” (Flanders Architecture Institute and Hasselt University, 2023); “Decon and Reuse” (Build Reuse, 2017–present); and the “Renew Reuse Regrow” summit (The Architect’s Newspaper, 2021–present). 7 French architects Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal, known for never demolishing buildings, received the 2021 Pritzker Prize.
Jeanne Gang is an architect and founding partner of Studio Gang, which has offices in Chicago, New York, San Francisco, and Paris. She is also the Kajima Professor in Practice of Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.
Lizabeth Cohen is a historian and author of many books, most recently Saving America’s Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age. She is also the Howard Mumford Jones Research Professor of American Studies and former dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.