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Adaptive reuse: a critical review

Francesca Lanz & John Pendlebury

To cite this article: Francesca Lanz & John Pendlebury (2022) Adaptive reuse: a critical review,
The Journal of Architecture, 27:2-3, 441-462, DOI: 10.1080/13602365.2022.2105381
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 441 The Journal
of Architecture
Volume 27
Numbers 2–3

Adaptive reuse: a critical review

Buildings have always been reused for both pragmatic and symbolic Francesca Lanz
reasons. However, out of the turbulence of the mid-twentieth
century, stimulated by reactions against modern ‘clean-sweep’ plan- School of Design
ning, a new field of policy and practice emerged in the 1970s to University of Lincoln, UK
respond to the burgeoning conservation movement and growing and
environmental awareness, which came to be termed ‘adaptive reuse’. School of Arts and Cultures
The last decade in particular has seen a flourishing of interest in adap- Newcastle University, UK
tive reuse both on the ground and in scholarship. Today, the practice [email protected]
is witnessed across the architectural spectrum, from starchitects to the
most modest community-generated projects. Adaptive reuse is ideologi- ORCID 0000-0002-0041-1649
cally supported through heritage and carbon reduction campaigning,
and is evident in policy and education. In this paper, we critically
review the rise of adaptive reuse scholarship and the emergent epistem- John Pendlebury
ology it represents, with a focus on the past twenty years and more
recent monographs in the field. What we discern in these texts is a School of Architecture, Planning and
recent shift in the debate toward a more theoretical approach to the Landscape
subject. While the debate on adaptive reuse has been continuously Newcastle University, UK
developing since the 1970s, it did so mostly with a focus on mapping [email protected]
and depicting an architectural phenomenon, and identifying tools and
strategies to instruct practitioners and designers. However, more ORCID 0000-0001-5388-9091
recent works on adaptive reuse are increasingly seeking to go beyond
a pragmatic and practice-focused approach, and to investigate adaptive
reuse in a more conceptual way. In doing so, they might open up the
debate to new disciplinary contributions beyond the domain of architec-
ture and design. This paper aims to outline and contribute to this shift.

Introduction: the emergence of adaptive reuse

Buildings have always been reused for both pragmatic and symbolic reasons.
Throughout the known history of architecture, the sheer cost and effort of con-
struction has meant that practicality most often dictates the repurposing of edi-
fices for new functional needs or to reflect new architectural fashionabilities,
rather than start afresh. Equally, there are prominent examples of building
reuse having an overt symbolic dimension, such as when associated with
changes of political or religious control. The Modern Movement of the twenti-
eth century heralded new architecture and planning throughout western
countries that combine the promise of industrial production and cheap

# 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis GroupThis is an
Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommer-
cial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-
commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is prop-
erly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.

1360-2365 https://doi.org/10.1080/13602365.2022.2105381
442 Adaptive reuse: a critical review
Francesca Lanz and John Pendlebury

energy. In this new era of city-shaping, constructions were made based on the
starting point of a tabula rasa and far fewer buildings were to be reused.
However, this was proven to be a relatively brief historical moment. Out of
the turbulence of the mid-twentieth century, stimulated by reactions
against such ‘clean-sweep’ planning, a new field of policy and practice
focused on reusing rather than replacing answered to the blooming conser-
vation and environmental movements, rapidly rising energy costs. These
emergent architectural praxis since the 1970s are saving as well as transform-
ing pre-existing old buildings.1 This came to be named ‘adaptive reuse’2
which became common in those years when, in parallel to projects on the
ground, a new literature advocating and chronicling adaptive reuse began
to develop.3
Thus, the idea of adaptive reuse as a field of study and practice, rooted in and
linked to, but distinct from the longer history of building conservation, has
been with us now for around half a century. However, the last decade or so
has seen a new rise of interest in adaptive reuse both on the ground and in
scholarship. The practice today is witnessed across the architectural spectrum,
from starchitects to the most modest community-generated projects. Adaptive
reuse is a flourishing and varied practice activity, supported by a rising fashion
for its associated aesthetics with clients and the wider public. Its perceived
potential has captured attention within the architectural and conservation
communities, and beyond. While the architectural world has embraced it as
a key, growing, and creative design practice with a steady rise in the number
and variety of projects worldwide, adaptive reuse is nowadays widely regarded
to play a key role in strategic intervention in urban settings to address the
increasingly urgent questions, as well as cultural and economic challenges, of
how to deal with redundant building stock that is growing and heterogeneous?
Policy advocating adaptive reuse was once confined to heritage protection, but
is now found more widely.4 For example, the European Union is developing
policy in this area, as well as funding research and innovation projects under
its Horizon 2020 programme. Carbon reduction campaigning, prompted by
the climate emergency, has given further impetus to adaptive reuse as a prefer-
able strategy to demolish and replace; the Architects Journal’s #RetroFirst cam-
paign is a prominent example in the UK. Adaptive reuse has also begun to find a
greater place in architectural education, with some schools specialising in this
area.5
Hence, since the early 2000s, the debate on adaptive reuse has developed
momentum and has become an increasingly relevant, recurrent, and a main-
stream topic. Most of the authors who have been writing about adaptive
reuse in the past ten years advocate its crucial role in responding to many of
the challenges posed by the contemporary world. Furthermore, as Sally
Stone points out, the very concept of ‘re-use’ reflects a cultural attitude
proper to our time. ‘Reduce, Reuse, Recycle’, says Stone, ‘is a slogan or state-
ment that epitomises the twenty-first century post-industrial society’s need for
everything to be useful, to have a purpose and be interesting, to be authentic or
real.’6
 443 The Journal
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Volume 27
Numbers 2–3

In this context, it is not surprising that a burgeoning literature concerned with

adaptive reuse has been developing in recent years. This paper follows earlier
literature reviews on adaptive reuse.7 Our aim is to both update these
reviews, given the volume of new work that has emerged, but also to bring
a sharpened and extended focus on the most recent theory-oriented scholarly
contributions in the field, and to extend discussion beyond solely architecture-
related and design-oriented considerations. Due to the sheer number of publi-
cations, we primarily concentrate on books, with only passing reference to
shorter works. We classify books into three categories: ‘atlases of examples’,
‘handbooks’, and ‘theoretical monographs’, although these are not neat div-
isions, with many of the books encompassed and detailed elements that
belong to two or all three of our categories. ‘Atlases of examples’ mostly
seek to describe and map practices according to a variety of criteria; ‘hand-
books’ have more of a ‘how to do’ emphasis; and ‘theoretical monographs’
are characterised by an attempt to unfold and conceptualise ideas of adaptive
reuse. In drawing this literature overview, our goal is to critically review the rise
of adaptive reuse scholarship, and the emergent epistemology it represents,
setting the framework for a reflection on adaptive reuse not only as practice
but also as a conceptual framework, extending beyond a historical focus on
design.

Adaptive reuse: a literature overview

Initially, the term adaptive reuse was mostly associated with literature advocat-
ing an approach to planning and architecture that was conservation-orien-
tated, in a decisive break with ideas of ‘clean-sweep’ planning, common
(although never ubiquitous) in the 1950s and 1960s. At that point, adaptive
reuse publications can be linked with a particular strand of the conservation
movement, which was moving beyond the monumental focus of its antece-
dents to engage with a wider urbanism. As such, adaptive reuse was seen as
part of making ‘a good city’ as much as protecting an important cultural inheri-
tance. In this respect, its epistemology developed from key writers about the
city as much as the seers of heritage practice. For example, Jane Jacobs
wrote about the importance of old buildings as a flexible, low-rent resource
critical for dynamic urbanism.8
A strong focus in 1970s writings was first and foremost to demonstrate that
adaptive reuse is practical, achievable, and economic, and to posit it as an archi-
tectural intervention as much as building anew. The artistic and creative possi-
bilities of adaptive reuse had been highlighted by an emergent architectural
praxis; the work of Carlo Scarpa and projects such as Castelvecchio Museum
became talismanic in this process. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, there
was a steady accumulation of further literature, drawing together the conser-
vation focus, the creative possibilities, and issues of practicality, with something
of a shift in emphasis towards demonstrating excellence, both in terms of
reflections on, on the one hand, conservation principles and, on the other,
the quality of new design used as part of often quite radical interventions in
444 Adaptive reuse: a critical review
Francesca Lanz and John Pendlebury

changing use. Thematically, there was a notable and enduring emphasis on the
legacies of industrialism and re-using redundant industrial buildings and struc-
tures.9
In the past twenty years, publications devoted to adaptive reuse have been
proliferating so rapidly that it is hard to keep up with the flow of literature
generated. Writings are wide in number and heterogeneous in their focus
and scope, with contributions by academics, practitioners, and journalists,
but often with little cross-reference between them. Such publications encom-
pass scholarly studies, including papers in international academic journals,
monographs, edited volumes, conference proceedings, doctoral theses,
research reports, and didactic materials, as well as articles in architectural
magazines and a number of popular publications, such as books and period-
icals aimed at the non-specialist public.
Therefore, the selection of the works to be discussed in this literature review
required careful thought and filtering criteria. First, the array of publications dis-
cussed includes only scientific and scholarly works, chiefly monographs,
straightforwardly relating to the concept of ‘adaptive reuse’ (that is where
the authors overtly use the term, or equivalent, to define the scope of their
work), and with a principal focus on those published within the past twenty
or so years, i.e. from the turn of the millennium onward to the early months
of 2020. Our selection has been further limited to texts written in English.
This Anglophone literature, mostly originating in North America and Western
Europe can be hypothesised as representing particular building cultures and
geographies of approach. This is a limitation; research has shown how adaptive
reuse even across Europe is a highly variable practice, conditioned by a range of
factors including governance and regulation, resources and social attitudes.10
Finally, it needs to be noted that almost all of the texts considered fall within
the architectural and design spheres. This is not because of any intentional dis-
ciplinary or thematic filtering, but because publications dealing with adaptive
reuse beyond design-related fields are, to the authors’ knowledge, very few
— a consideration that will become relevant in the conclusions of this article.11

Journal articles
Peer-reviewed articles focused on adaptive reuse, with a few exceptions, are
mostly subject-specific works, using detailed case study analysis.12 Broadly
speaking, we can identify two main types of papers. The first comprises texts
aimed at discussing specific problem-oriented design approaches and technical
solutions for adaptive reuse interventions such as construction, engineering,
restoration and architectural preservation techniques, models for assessing
adaptive reuse interventions as part of the building life cycle, decision-
making, sustainability, or the evaluation of adaptive reuse potential. The
second — typically those published in architectural design journals and maga-
zines — focuses on cases of reuse intervention, usually recent ones, which are
described and analysed with the support of numerous images and drawings,
mostly focused on the design aspects.
 445 The Journal
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Within this general framework, the journal Int|AR (Interventions and Adap-
tive Reuse), a yearly publication by the Department of Interior Architecture of
Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), is an unusual case. The RISD runs bache-
lor and master’s courses on interior design and adaptive reuse, and the Int|AR
journal reflects this focus, with each issue gathering contributions around a
specific theme. Relatively short papers generally revolve around the analysis
of one case study, usually complemented by a plentiful supply of images and
drawings. Thus, whilst Int|AR is the only journal solely devoted to adaptive
reuse, it also has a very particular position in terms of its disciplinary scope
and rationale; thus, it adopts a format that makes it a hybrid publication in-
between a scholarly journal and an architectural edited volume.

Monographs
We have counted over thirty books devoted to adaptive reuse published in
English in the past twenty years, including scholarly publications and more
broad-target publications. Aware of the limits and the potential reductive
nature of any taxonomy, we have organised our discussion by means of
three categories mentioned — ‘atlases of examples’, ‘handbooks’ and ‘theor-
etical monographs’ — in a broad typology of publication that should not be
understood as defining closed categories, but as a means to illustrate different
approaches. Space precludes us from considering edited volumes and confer-
ence proceedings.13 Although the heterogeneity of the contributions included
in these publications reflects and represents the rich variety of the possible
approaches, points of view, and research practices unfolding around adaptive
reuse, it also implies that edited volumes cannot bracketed under a single over-
arching working hypothesis and each chapter should be analysed on its own.

Atlases of examples — illustrating adaptive reuse. ‘Atlas of examples’ of reuse inter-

ventions are based on a collection of case studies and have a chiefly illustrative
purpose. They predominantly revolve around the relevance of adaptive reuse
practices toward one or a set of specific contemporary architectural and plan-
ning issues and challenges — most commonly the reuse of former industrial
buildings and former industrial areas — and use a large number of examples
to illustrate the book’s thesis. They frequently adopt a common structure con-
sisting of one or more introductory chapters presenting the book’s overarching
topic and framing adaptive reuse within this, before introducing the case
studies and their selection criteria. This first part is followed by the case
studies, which constitute the core of the book. The examples are selected in
relation to the book’s overarching topic, presented one-by-one through a
rich repertoire of images and sometimes design drawings, and by a short com-
mentary text that describes each case, with a focus on its architectural, spatial,
and material features. The examples are usually ordered following typological
(in relation either to the original function of the building or its new given
use), chronological, and/or geographical criteria, and in some cases, by adopt-
ing additional or alternative analytical criteria commonly conceptualised as
446 Adaptive reuse: a critical review
Francesca Lanz and John Pendlebury

‘strategies of intervention’. Most atlases lack a conclusive section pulling

together the book’s introduction and the presentation of the case studies.
One of the first such atlases was Sherban Cantacuzino’s New Uses for Old
Buildings (1975). Cantacuzino’s aim was to demonstrate the potential rel-
evance of adaptive reuse toward a series of urban challenges of the time —
notably urban deindustrialisation, the uncontrolled, low-quality growth of
cities’ outskirts, and city centre depopulation. In the introduction, he presents
adaptive reuse as an architectural practice that can counterstrike such phenom-
ena by avoiding large-scale demolition and support more thoughtful urban
planning and urban intervention. The book draws on a series of articles pub-
lished in the journal Architectural Review in 1972 and presents seventy-three
case studies. These are used to support the author’s wish to ‘make people
aware of the value of industrial buildings […], and underline the urgent need
to find new uses in order to avert irreparable loss through demolition’.14
More recent examples of atlases include publications by authors from diverse
backgrounds, many of which can be positioned as in-between architectural and
broad-targeted publications. By way of illustration, the volume Build On (2009)
is a 240-page, largely photographic volume, collecting 84 mainly western Euro-
pean projects standing for different modes of interventions on pre-existing
buildings, complied by Robert Klanteen and Lukas Feireiss, authors of similar
books on different subjects.15 Other examples include the volume by Chris
van Uffelen Re-Use Architecture (2011),16 including one hundred examples
organised typologically according to their new function; Pierre Thiebaut’s Old
Buildings Looking for New Use (2007),17 with sixty-one European case
studies grouped by the original function of the pre-existing building; and the
two publications by Antonia Edwards, founder of the blog Upcyclist.18
Some atlases are more precisely targeted at designers and architects. These
usually include many examples illustrated not only by images but also drawings,
typically as plans and elevations, interviews with architects and designers, and
with longer and more articulated introductory sections, including contributions
aimed at providing a general theoretical framework of the whole book. For
example, Architecture Reborn (1999) by Kenneth Powell19 includes over forty
examples of adaptive reuse projects designed by major architectural firms in
Europe and the US in the previous decade, organised according to new func-
tion and presented within the overarching author’s thesis that adaptive reuse
is an act of creation beyond the conservation of architectural spaces. Other
examples of atlases chiefly targeted at designers include the edited volumes
by Christian Schittich, Building in Existing Fabrics (2003),20 and The City as a
Loft (2012)21 by Martina Baum and Kees Christiaanse, and the books Adap-
tations (1989) 22 by Philippe Robert, and Old & New (2010) 23 by Frank Peter
Jager.
Even though most such atlases have a chiefly illustrative approach and
descriptive scope, some involve a thoughtful selection of projects, accurate
archival and field research, and, in some cases, include insightful argumenta-
tion. For example, Francesco Cherchi’s introductory chapter of his book Typo-
logical Shift: Adaptive Reuse of Abandoned Historic Hospitals in Europe (2016)
 447 The Journal
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on the reuse of disused historic hospitals in Europe proposes an interpretation

of adaptive reuse as a process of ‘re-signification of form in the absence of the
original function’.24 Adaptive reuse is considered as a transformative process
that starts with a moment of disuse and ‘neglect’. In Cherchi’s interpretation,
disuse is not abandonment, a gap in the building life span, or an end, nor
merely the condition preliminary to a reuse action, but it is rather a necessary
moment of ‘functional suspension’, a phase of a process of ‘typological
shift’, i.e. an evolution of what already exists into a new asset.25 Cherchi
does not further develop this idea but, as we discuss in our conclusion, conceiv-
ing adaptive reuse as a ‘shift’, and addressing building disuse and neglect
within such process, have the potential to open up the debate in new direc-
tions.
Another example is Architectural Voices (2007) by David Littlefield and Saskia
Lewis which revolves around the idea that buildings have a ‘voice’.26 Through
examples and interviews, the authors explore how architects and designers
attend to the pre-existing building by listening and attuning to it, to apprehend
its affordances to be subsequently transformed by design intervention. Each
intervention is discussed in an essay-like chapter, involving site visits, historical
research, interviews, and personal, almost autoethnographic and sensory,
observations, and in doing so offering an example of a possible different
approach to the case-study-based analysis that characterises atlases.
Finally, ‘research books’ are another distinct form of atlas, collecting case
studies analysed as part of a wider research project, often involving fieldwork
supported by research questions and a theoretical background, linking to our
category of ‘theoretical monographs’ below. Examples of this kind of publi-
cation are the volumes Re-cycle (2012),27 Reduce Reuse Recycle (2012),28
and Re-cycle Italy (2017),29 which all frame reuse through the concept of recy-
cling, and conclude with a manifesto positing reuse as an environmentally
aware as well as economic and socially sustainable architectural intervention
in the built environment.

Handbooks — instructing adaptive reuse. Most ‘handbooks’ (and some of the texts
we classify as ‘theoretical monographs’) use the case study format found with
atlases. Usually targeted at practitioners and architecture and design students,
handbooks use case studies to expound strategies and methodologies of adap-
tive reuse, rather than to illustrate practices and trends. The purpose of hand-
books is thus to identify and define approaches, sets of informed process-
oriented design strategies, and methods for adaptive reuse interventions,
which are exemplified by selected projects.
Handbooks also have their origins in the 1970s. Industrial Rehabilitation
(1984) by Peter Eley and John Worthington was developed from a series of
articles published by the authors from 1978 to 1979 in the Architect’s
Journal.30 Including a selection of 23 examples of former industrial buildings
refurbished for new uses, the volume provides a step-by-step methodology
for the development of adaptive reuse interventions, with an emphasis on
financial viability. There are more recent volumes similarly focusing on key tech-
448 Adaptive reuse: a critical review
Francesca Lanz and John Pendlebury

nical, architectural, legal, and financial principles of building adaptation,

include the books by David Highfield Refurbishment and Upgrading of Build-
ings (2000),31 the two volumes by Derek Latham Creative Reuse of Buildings
(2000),32 and the publication by James Douglas Building Adaptation (2002).33
Other non-Anglo-Saxon recent examples of handbooks include RE–USA
(2017) by the Italian scholar Matteo Robiglio.34 The book is intended as a
‘toolkit’; focusing on the re-functionalisation of former industrial buildings,
Robiglio uses the analyses of twenty American examples to propose an
eight-step method for the reuse of former factories, presented by the author
as a key strategic architectural and urban design approach to the challenges
posed by contemporary post-industrial cities and their industrial legacy.
Reuse, Redevelop and Design (2020),35 led by Paul Meurs and Marinke Steen-
huis, focuses specifically on promoting adaptive reuse as a ‘heritage solution’ in
the Netherlands, with five essays encompassing partnership working, funding
and design, followed by twenty examples primarily but not exclusively from the
Netherlands. Architecture in Existing Fabric (2007)36 by Johannes Cramer and
Stefan Breitling, German practitioners trained in the field of architecture and
archaeology, describe their intention as ‘to provide orientation, make connec-
tions and explain approaches’.37 Similar to other handbooks, their volume
adopts a manual like structure, with each chapter addressing different practical
design issues involved in a reuse intervention. They focus on practical and tech-
nical aspects, starting from the planning process and preliminary surveys,
through to the detailed design stage, including discussion of possible design
strategies.
The identification of design strategies is a recurrent approach in many pub-
lications focusing on adaptive reuse, handbooks in particular. Worthy of special
mention are works by Graeme Brooker and Sally Stone.38 Brooker and Stone
have been writing, researching, and publishing on adaptive reuse since the
early 2000s. In 2004 they wrote one of the best-known monographs on adap-
tive reuse, Rereadings, recently followed by a second volume Rereadings 2
(2020), is not a step-by-step manual-like text nor a theoretical text as such.
Rereadings is an attempt to grasp and describe an emerging architectural
phenomenon ‘based on an understanding of the theoretical method of the
interpretation and adaptation employed by the architect or designer’.39
Brooker and Stone put forward a three-stage process for adaptive reuse inter-
ventions — Analysis, Strategy, and Tactics40 — each of which is broken down
into different tasks and illustrated by a large collection of examples.41 The
authors ground their approach to adaptive reuse as ‘re-reading’ on Rodolfo
Machado’s 1976 idea of ‘remodelling’, to propose an approach to the reuse
design process focused on the relation between the new intervention and
the existing building.42 Their work intersects the two categories so far
described: it adopts an ‘atlas’ format largely relying on case studies and
pursues a methodological and design-centred scope associated here with
‘handbooks’. With its refined analytical and critical approach, Brooker and
Stone’s work transcends these categories and steps towards the texts we
characterise as ‘theoretical monographs’.
 449 The Journal
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Volume 27
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Theoretical monographs — thinking adaptive reuse. ‘Theoretical monographs’ can be

distinguished from the publications discussed so far by their overt intention to
develop a reflection on adaptive reuse from a theoretical point of view.43 In this
section, we focus briefly on three recently published theoretical monographs
on adaptive reuse, as well as one earlier work. Each articulates and unfolds
an interpretation of adaptive reuse not only as a design practice but also as
an approach to architecture and the built environment.
Bie Plevoets and Koenraad Van Cleempoel’s Adaptive Reuse of the Built Heri-
tage (2019) builds on a series of journal articles jointly published by the authors
and Plevoets’s doctoral dissertation, which altogether have played a significant
role in chronicling the development of adaptive reuse literature. The book’s aim
is ‘to identify the opportunities and address the problems related to the adap-
tive reuse of buildings and sites in a theoretical manner’.44 In its first part, the
volume offers an overview on the state of the art of the debate on adaptive
reuse, presenting its historical underpinnings, setting definitions, and outlining
key approaches and core issues. In the second part, following an atlas format,
these reflections are complemented by twenty brief case studies that span from
ancient to vernacular and spontaneous examples of adaptive reuse, passing
through post-1945 interventions, to more recent contemporary projects includ-
ing museums and housing projects, as well as urban rehabilitations. The book
as a whole offers interesting insights into different aspects of adaptive reuse,
touching upon issues related with the relationship between adaptive reuse
interventions and urban regeneration, ideas of heritage, ruins and ruin aes-
thetic, meaning and memory. Of the texts considered in this section, this
book can be most clearly located in a conservation-orientated tradition of
writing about reuse. Following a foreword by Sally Stone that focuses on
ideas of authenticity, Plevoets and Van Cleempoel settle on the concept of
genius loci, or sense of place, as an organising framework for intervention. It
is considered as a generative rather than a revealed concept, and therefore
better able to respond to the future-orientated practice of adapting and
reusing. Ultimately the book aims to set the framework of the debate on adap-
tive reuse and demonstrate the relevance of reuse toward contemporary issues
related to architectural interventions into the built environment. This is an argu-
ment about the disciplinary autonomy of adaptive reuse, which, say the authors
— has a ‘complexity and specificity’ — that ‘make it a discipline in its own right,
intersecting architecture, interior design, planning, engineering, and conserva-
tion’.45
Also laying claim to adaptive reuse as a distinct field, Liliane Wong’s book
Adaptive Reuse (2017) has the aim to ‘to understand and convey the
approaches of adaptive reuse through the examination of its place in
history, its relationship to adjacent fields, its place within shifting norms of
art, culture and society and its typological differences, so as to illuminate a
neglected subject in its own light’.46 Architectural practice has been under-
pinned by principles that have been explored, discussed, and theorised for
millennia — from, for example, Vitruvius, Le Corbusier, to Koolhaas — the
same principle, claims Wong, should be applied to adaptive reuse, as a rela-
450 Adaptive reuse: a critical review
Francesca Lanz and John Pendlebury

tively recent but distinct architectural process. Her book unfolds around a
central question: what determines the success of an adaptive reuse interven-
tion? To answer this question, Wong discusses the tension between erasure
and continuation, between preserving and building anew, and the inherent
dual nature of any adaptive reuse intervention. She focuses on the ‘host’
building and suggests that it has a ‘unique DNA’47 and that a project of adap-
tive reuse is distinguished from a simple change of function by ‘the presence
of soul, the essence of the host building’.48 When an equilibrium between the
host and the intervention is not reached, the result is a subversion of the built
structure of the existing building, with the adapted building affected by a
‘Frankenstein Syndrome’, due to the introduction of a new and incompatible
order.49 With this concept at the core of her work, she discusses adaptive
reuse in relation to the historical debate on preservation and restoration,
before focusing on the architectural features of pre-existing buildings and
their role in the reuse design process. This leads her to introduce different
possible approaches to reuse, and outline strategies of interventions exempli-
fied through selected examples, finishing by suggesting that adaptive reuse
interventions are analogous to the second violins in an orchestra, with the
host building the first. Building on her own expertise as a practising architect,
her teaching and research experience at the Rhode Island School of Design,
and insights gathered from being one of the editors of the Int|AR Journal,
Wong gives a wide interpretation of what adaptive reuse is by understanding
it as an (interior) architectural practice.
A quite different approach is taken by Fred Scott. His book, On Altering
Architecture (2008), is the oldest of our selected theoretical monographs on
adaptive reuse, pre-empting the others by almost ten years.50 Its aim is ‘to
confer on the process of alteration a certain consciousness, for the purpose
of supporting a radical intelligence with regard to the work’ and it is ‘intended
to lay out a geography of a discrete topic within the general realm of the dis-
cipline of the built environment’.51 The book moves from the standpoint that
‘alteration’, including but extending beyond adaptive reuse, is a practice that
is not the prerogative of any specific design discipline, teaching, or professional
realm. Alteration is explored in comparison and in contrast with ‘pure architec-
ture’ and architectural preservation. Scott is the only one of the authors con-
sidered here to thoroughly relate his discussion to more mainstream
architectural theory including, for example, modernists such as Cedric Price,
who opposed building reuse. The book does not follow the typical model of
theoretical chapters followed by cases studies. In Scott’s case, each chapter is
a stand-alone reflection in relation to a specific issue, making it difficult to
effectively summarise. However, a principal idea running through the book
understands adaptive reuse as ‘alteration’, an ‘agent of re-occupation’, and
as a design practice peer to, but distinguished from, other architectural prac-
tices.52 In an adaptive reuse intervention, Scott argues, the disjunction
between the function and the form (also discussed by Cherchi) involves reflec-
tions on values and meaning, as well as aesthetic, formal, and architectural
choices; this makes alteration a complex design practice, distinguished from
 451 The Journal
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pure architecture, and an alternative to preservation and demolition. Like

Wong, he uses a musical performance analogy, with alteration ‘more like a
duet than a solo’.53 Alteration, Scott points out, is to be understood as an
‘act of transition or translation, from the past into the present, with logically
also a consideration for the future of the host building’. Otherwise, he says,
an adaptive reuse intervention would be ‘doubly destructive’ because, on the
one hand, it would alter the host building in a deep and radical way. removing
any possibility of conservation traditionally understood, and, on the other hand,
it would lose ‘the hope of a new building’.54
Sally Stone proposes the same metaphor of adaptive reuse as an act of ‘trans-
lation’ in her book Undoing Buildings (2020), where the ‘the architect or the
designer can uncover the meaning within a place, activate, and therefore use
it to instigate and liberate a new future’.55 As with Scott, the idea of adaptive
reuse as translation implies a process of reading and understanding a building,
‘uncovering meanings’, selecting and interpreting them, and creating connec-
tions from the past in the present for the future.56 Stone develops her reflec-
tions on adaptive reuse through critically exploring different practices,
methods, and architectural approaches to reuse. Each chapter deals with a
different issue pertaining to the process of ‘undoing buildings’, a concept
that challenges the building as a singular, stable structure with a single
meaning. Topics covered include the role of arts, urban planning, temporary
actions, conservation, sustainable design, and digital technologies, before
eventually focusing on two main design strategies that she names ‘taking
away’ and ‘making additions.’
Two more books warrant brief mention here due to their different
approaches to adaptive reuse. The first is by Graham Moon, Robin Kearns,
and Alun Joseph, The Afterlives of Psychiatric Asylums (2015).57 It is not a
book about adaptive reuse as such, but about the recycling of redundant
asylum buildings in relation to their continuing associated meaning and mem-
ories, with examples from Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom.
What makes this book particularly noteworthy is that, unlike the others con-
sidered so far, the authors are not architects. Julia Hegewald and Subrata
Mitra’s Re-use: The Art and Politics of Integration and Anxiety (2012) is
another unusual example of a book on adaptive reuse developed from a
non-architectural perspective as a collection of fourteen essays with contri-
butions from the field of humanities and social sciences, exploring reuse prac-
tices of different kinds in art, architecture, and literature in the past and present
within the region of south Asia.58 Moon, Kearns, and Joseph are human and
socio-cultural geographers; Hegewald and Mitra are respectively an art histor-
ian and a political scientist. Little referenced in the dominant architecture and
design discourse, these books present new ideas and perspectives on adaptive
reuse. For example, the concept of ‘strategic forgetting and selective remem-
brance’ developed by Moon, Kearns, and Joseph59 was deployed and further
articulated by John Pendlebury, Yi-Wen Wang, and Andrew Law in their
paper on the adaptive reuse of ‘uncomfortable heritage’ (2017).60 Equally,
however, it should be noted that neither Moon, Kearns, and Joseph nor Hege-
452 Adaptive reuse: a critical review
Francesca Lanz and John Pendlebury

wald and Mitra make any reference to the large corpus of architectural studies
in the field of adaptive reuse discussed above.

Discussion: tracing the evolution of the debate

Our first goal with this paper is to provide a critical literature review on adaptive
reuse, tracing the evolution of the debate. In this section, we discuss
observations drawn from the literature presented to identify possible critical-
ities and limits in the current discourse. In doing so our aim is to contribute
to this debate and especially to the recent and ongoing shift toward a more
speculative approach to the subject; to that end in the subsequent conclusions,
we outline possible directions for further development.
First, if we chart the texts discussed in this paper on a timeline (Fig. 1), we
can observe that while the majority were initially pursuing a practice-oriented
scope, works deploying a more theoretical and speculative approach have
subsequently emerged. Many of the earlier publications adopt the atlas
and/or handbook models and were aimed at mapping and depicting an emer-
ging phenomenon, illustrating its potential relevance, claiming for adaptive
reuse’s potential as a sphere of creative design, and identifying tools, strat-
egies and approaches to instruct practitioners. More recent publications, prin-
cipally but not solely those that we have classed as theoretical monographs,
are characterised, however, by a theoretical will and are increasingly
seeking to go beyond a pragmatic and practice-focused approach, and to
investigate adaptive reuse in a more conceptual way. Despite their different
approaches and ideas on adaptive reuse, these publications enquire into prin-
ciples and epistemologies for adaptive reuse. In doing so, we argue, they put
forward new interpretative strands worthy of further development and, cru-
cially, the possibility of opening up debates on adaptive reuse to new and
beneficial interdisciplinary contributions beyond the domain of architecture
and design.
Second, as discussed, the majority of the publications on adaptive reuse
reviewed have been written by practising architects and/or architectural
scholars; this has contributed to making adaptive reuse a subject matter pri-
marily of design disciplinary debate so far. However, notwithstanding the
relatively small arena this represents, and the substantial quantity of publi-
cations released on the topic in the past twenty years, we found little
cross-fertilisation and synergies among these works. This is evident even
with theoretical monographs, which whilst referencing recurrent main-
stream texts, draw little on each other’s ideas, be it to confute or incremen-
tally develop them. Equally, until recently this literature has rarely engaged
with contributions, ideas, and theories from other disciplines. Thus, although
the debate on adaptive reuse have been incorporating new issues emerging
in wider architectural debate since the 1970s, it mostly developed within a
disciplinary continuity, both in terms of its core topics and argumentative
approaches.
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This is evident in the recurrent common structure of books on adaptive reuse, Figure 1.
largely based on an atlas model, as well as in their dominant leitmotiv meta- Timeline of the publications
discussed in the paper, organised
phors. Stemming from Machado’s 1976 essay, this is most obvious with the
by analytical categories: ‘atlases of
use of palimpsest to describe an adapted building, but metaphors are a recur- examples’, ‘handbooks’, and
rent feature of the literature; the works we have outlined relate adaptive reuse ‘theoretical monographs’,
to types of performance (e.g. music) and literary process (e.g. (re)writing, compiled by authors Lanz and
(re)reading, and translation).61 There are also inescapable references to Pendlebury, 2020

Ledoux, Ruskin, and Morris, and to post-1945 talismanic projects such as

Scarpa’s Castelvecchio, which has been repositioned from a project of critical
restoration, inherently tangled with the peculiar post-Second World War
Italian cultural and architectural context, to a foundational example of adaptive
reuse (referenced extensively in the books we discuss by Scott and Stone, but
also found in many others).
Above all, this continuity is evident in a focus on design strategies of interven-
tion, revolving around two key issues; first, the definition and relevance of
adaptive reuse as a designerly deed, an architectural practice distinct from
but equal to ‘pure architecture’ and, second, the dichotomous relationship
between the pre-existing building to be reused and the new intervention. Here-
after we discuss the implications and limits of this and, in our conclusions, the
identification of some lines of enquiry, which in our opinion are worth further
study, for their potential to advance debate, including from a more interdisci-
plinary perspective.
454 Adaptive reuse: a critical review
Francesca Lanz and John Pendlebury

Perhaps not surprisingly, within the wealth of writing on adaptive reuse,

there is no common and shared agreement on what adaptive reuse precisely
is and what it entails. The literature documents a vast number of projects
that show that the idea of adaptive reuse is freely interpreted in a multitude
of ways. Whilst initially there was a focus on the architecturally led conservation
and reuse of heritage buildings, with a preponderance of examples of former
industrial buildings, adaptive reuse today can involve any type of architectural
asset, regardless of size, prior or new function, single edifices, big architectural
complexes and infrastructures, as well as open spaces, gardens, squares, urban
interstices, and much more. Interventions presented in these publications are
also hugely diverse in their outcome and in the undertaking they imply, span-
ning prestigious high-profile commissions by so-called starchitects, to step-by-
step crowdfunded projects, and from conservative architectural preservation
interventions to projects involving significant demolition, new construction,
and addition, to more modest, ephemeral, and temporary projects, reversible
interventions, and art-based actions.
Similarly, scouring these texts for a definition, we find quite different
interpretations about what adaptive reuse is. First, the range of terms used
to name the process of ‘adaptive reuse’ is extremely wide, including remodel-
ling, rewriting, rereading, undoing, adaptation, recycling, alteration, upcycling,
and reactivation. Along with these terms introduced into the discourse during
recent decades, we also came across other more commonly used terms in wider
architectural scholarship and practice, such as renovation, restoration, preser-
vation, conservation, repair, renewal, refurbishment, conversion, modernis-
ation, retrofitting, rehabilitation, and maintenance. Their use is anything but
consistent; sometimes they are used as synonyms of adaptive reuse, elsewhere
to name distinct elements of the adaptive reuse process itself. Whilst this can be
seen as an ongoing attempt to define critical analytical categories and positions
for the study and practice of a still-emerging field, the plethora of different
terms results in disparate definitions that weakens the ability to establish a
common ground for debate. Not by chance, several authors dealing with adap-
tive reuse included chapters or sections aimed at clarifying terminology, and in
the attempt to fix definitions.62
More conceptually, the way adaptive reuse is understood also varies signifi-
cantly, not least because different authors, while sharing a background in the
field of architecture, have disciplinary positions, traditions, and agendas. There
are common threads of, on the one hand, demonstrating the relevance of
adaptive reuse as part of the world of architectural design and, on the other,
to posit adaptive reuse as an architectural practice distinct from but equal to
building from scratch (with a degree of ambiguity about the relationship
between these two positions). Some authors identify adaptive reuse as the
practice of intervening on the built environment at large. Plevoets and Van
Cleempoel, for example, define it as ‘working with existing buildings’.63
Wong describes it as the act of ‘transforming an unused or underused building
into one that serves a new use’, including ‘not only the reuse of existing struc-
tures but also the reuse of materials, transformative interventions, continuation
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of cultural phenomena through built infrastructure, connections across the

fabric of time and space and preservation of memory’.64 These authors, by pro-
posing a wide definition of adaptive reuse, aim to demonstrate the potential
and richness of adaptive reuse as a field of research, practice, and teaching,
and to eventually posit it, more or less overtly, as a discipline in its own right.
Some other scholars, conversely, look at adaptive reuse as a very specific prac-
tice within a specific disciplinary realm and as a branch and a prerogative of a
specific teaching research and practice field. Above all, this is evident with the
field of interior architecture.65

Conclusions

As a first consideration, we can conclude that the search for a definition or con-
sensual description of what adaptive reuse is remains unresolved and is perhaps
eventually pointless. What emerges from the corpus of literature on the topic,
and the projects there featured, is that the practice of adaptive reuse does not
depend on the type of architectural asset involved, nor on its size, nature,
former function, and heritage status. An adaptive reuse project is not
defined either by particular design methods or approaches. However, this
broadness of field brings complications. While understanding adaptive reuse
as a synonym of intervening in the built environment at large, as some
authors propose, might be effective in demonstrating its richness, this
interpretation risks widening the scope of the debate to the extent that the
very idea of adaptive reuse may lose traction. Equally, a definition of adaptive
reuse from too rigid a disciplinary position maybe too limited in scope and lack
relationality, and thus fail in accounting for the complexities of a reuse interven-
tion. Above all, seeking a definition by looking at adaptive reuse solely as a
design-related matter, and with a chief attention to the identification of
design strategies, may preclude interdisciplinary connections, both from a prac-
tical and theoretical point of view, and limit possible contributions to the
debate from different disciplines within and beyond the architectural and
design domain. While the theoretical monographs discussed do draw from
wider literatures — most commonly in the creative arts — they generally do
so in service of the dominant design paradigm as there is little sense of
opening up productive dialogue with other disciplines. Most obviously, connec-
tions can and should be made in the social sciences with critical heritage and
memory studies and cultural geography, but with potential from other disci-
plines including literature and language studies.
Second, as we have referred to, one of the dominant leitmotifs in the debate
on adaptive reuse concerns the relationship between the old and the new. For
example, Wong explores this through the metaphor of (avoiding) the ‘Franken-
stein syndrome’. Beyond the different metaphors used, adaptive reuse has
been mainly discussed as a moment of disjunction between form and function,
assuming an oppositional duality of the old (the pre-existing building) versus
the new (the architectural reuse intervention). However, there are some ques-
tionable assumptions here, not often made explicit. Does the ‘form’ equal the
456 Adaptive reuse: a critical review
Francesca Lanz and John Pendlebury

façade and the ‘function’ equal the interior? Is the old equal to the building
exterior with the possibility of an ever-changing new building interior?
Where does the identity and the memory of a building lie? Is it only in its
exterior form and style or is it in its lived interiors? From this perspective, the
pre-existing building risks becoming a passive host for a new use, a ‘shell’,
suggesting a rift between the container and the content. Such an approach
may lead to an understanding of adaptive reuse practice as little more than a
well-designed inner wrap-up and sophisticated form of façadism, renouncing
an investigation of the deeper entailments of working within, i.e. with:
together and in: inside, a pre-existing building. By understanding adaptive
reuse solely as a specific design deed limited to the insertion of a new interven-
tion into a pre-existing structure, the focus is inevitably restricted to design
strategies and the material and physical aspects of adaptive reuse. By thinking
about space as assumed and not produced, such an approach eventually fails to
consider the broader and complex transformative agency of adaptive reuse
practice. It is our contention, therefore, that an uncritical focus on an opposi-
tional duality between the new and the old — and the architectural interven-
tion of adaptation necessary to overcome it — overlooks the potential of
considering adaptive reuse as a process may offer. Looked at through this
lens of process — rather than as a field of practice, an intervention of design
problem-solving, a branch of a discipline or a discipline in its own right —
may enable a critical account of reuse choices and their implications beyond
a limited architectural perspective.
Therefore, in this final section, it is our intention to emphasise the theoretical
potential of moving away from understanding adaptive reuse only as an archi-
tectural design intervention, to adaptive reuse as a process. To do this, we bring
together some of the ideas in the literature discussed, which can contribute to
developing a more all-encompassing processual approach to adaptive reuse.
Whilst an understanding of adaptive reuse as process is not articulated as
such in the work we analysed, it is implicit in some cases, especially those pro-
posing concepts like ‘shift’, ‘translation’, and ‘reoccupation’.
The idea of ‘shifts’, proposed by Cherchi, involves looking at adaptive
reuse as a process of transformation expanded in time.66 The idea is intro-
duced to address the disjunction between form and function but, interest-
ingly, it leads him to account for the often-overlooked disuse moment in
the life span of a building as a phase of reuse and not simply as the practical
precondition for it. Similarly, thinking of adaptive reuse as an act of ‘trans-
lation’ implies an understanding of reuse as a complex cultural and architec-
tural process, and again brings a different position to consider the
relationship between the old and the new.67 The very idea of the ‘pre-exist-
ing’ building as opposed to the new intervention can be framed quite differ-
ently from this perspective, because translation implies continuity and
synchronic coexistence of the new and the old, not rupture. Furthermore,
the concept of translation, as Stone points out, opens the debate on
adaptive reuse to further reflections on the ethics of uses of the past,
beyond the aesthetics of adaptive reuse. Translation, Stone continues,
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implies interpretations, selections, and appropriations of the past that necess-

arily ‘align with some readings, but against others’.68
The idea of adaptive reuse as ‘occupation’ and ‘reoccupation’ is also worth
further thought. Terry Meade, in his introduction to the book of abstracts for
the 2009 conference ‘Occupation: Negotiations with Constructed Space’,
posits the idea of occupation as a way of describing interventions of reuse
and adaptation of any space — not only pre-existing buildings — for it ‘encom-
passes the connection of human life with larger systems of social and technical
organisation, as well as the coupling between everyday conduct and spatial
context’. The concept of occupation puts a focus on the ‘relationship
between buildings and users’, implies ‘questions of space and time’, helps
understanding relationships between ‘people and politics, place and space’,
and allows an accounting for frictions of different kinds that happen during
the occupation of a space.69
In the specific context of publications on adaptive reuse the idea of ‘occu-
pation’ is often used in works focussing on ‘neglected’ and ‘uncomfortable her-
itages’ that prove to be particularly difficult to reuse.70 In particular, it is used as
an alternative to the idea of ‘designing’ to explore different and less formal or
normative ways of reuse, including provocative projects aimed at disturbing,
questioning, and challenging the legitimacy of established logics of use and
reuse of the built environment. Plevoets and Van Cleempoel, for example,
talk about ‘informal reuse and vernacular adaptation’ in relation to ‘ruins
reuse’ and, when commenting on the case of Kunsthaus Tacheles in Berlin,
they assert that ‘the space seemed “occupied” rather than “redesigned”’.71
Graeme Brooker uses the concept of occupation when discussing the adaptive
reuse of ‘unwanted’, ‘useless’, and ‘waste spaces’.72 For these leftover build-
ings and places, he says, an effective adaptive reuse strategy is the practice
of ‘edge-working’, i.e. a ‘method of reclaiming space through occupation,
albeit quite often for a short period of time’. In his essay No Longer, Not Yet,
Edward Hollis talks about ‘incomplete occupation’, describing a reuse strategy
he contributed to developing, consisting of a series of step-by-step interven-
tions designed to stimulate change, foster a re-appropriation of spaces, and
further other actions for the reuse of abandoned buildings, resistant to other
reuse strategies.73
To conclude, an interpretation of adaptive reuse as a process allows for, on
the one hand, an expanded understanding of adaptive reuse, considering its
implications beyond architectural aspects as well as its different phases in
time, including pre- and post-intervention. On the other hand, it gives traction
to the very idea of adaptive reuse as a relevant conceptual framework to think
through processes of transformation of the built environment as a re-appro-
priation and resignification deed, involving the reuse and re-valuing of a
place — and by extension its associations, memories, and behaviours —
which have been inactive or dormant. Such an understanding can expand
and enrich the debate on adaptive reuse, opening it up to reflections pertaining
to issues of memory and identity, owning and disowning, remembering and
forgetting practices, and heritage-making. It enables us to account for the
458 Adaptive reuse: a critical review
Francesca Lanz and John Pendlebury

social, cultural, and political entailments of adaptive reuse interventions that

remain inadequately considered in the current debate. These are, in our
opinion, promising new lines of enquiry enabled by the recent literature on
adaptive reuse and deserve to be further explored and developed, contributing
to the evolution of the debate.

Funding

Lanz’s contribution ensues from the Research Project ReMIND which has
received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and inno-
vation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie [grant agreement no.
841174]. Pendlebury’s contribution arises from the project OpenHeritage,
which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research
and innovation programme [grant agreement no. 776766].

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes and references

1. According to Kenneth Powell, from this moment ‘working with “old” buildings became a
key element in architectural practice. […] “Saving” old buildings is no longer enough. The
aim is not preservation but transformation.’ Kenneth Powell, Architecture Reborn: The
Conversion and Reconstruction of Old Buildings (London: Laurence King, 1999), p. 10.
2. Liliane Wong states that the term was first noted as being used by the Marriam-Webster
Dictionary in 1973. See Liliane Wong, Adaptive Reuse: Extending the Lives of Buildings
(Basel: Birkhauser, 2017), p. 30. On the origins and emergence of adaptive reuse refer
also to literature reviews previously developed (see note 7).
3. For influential early writings on adaptive reuse see, for example, Sherban Cantacuzino,
New Uses for Old Buildings (London: Architectural Press, 1975); Rodolfo Machado, ‘Old
Buildings as Palimpsest: Towards a Theory of Remodelling’, Progressive Architecture, 11
(1976), 46–9; Rodrigo Pérez de Arce, ‘Urban Transformations and the Architecture of
Additions’, Architectural Design, 4 (1978), 237–66; Peter Eley and John Worthington,
Industrial Rehabilitation: The Use of Redundant Buildings for Small Enterprises (London:
Architectural Press, 1984).
4. ‘Mapping of Current Heritage Re-Use Policies and Regulations in Europe: Complex Policy
Overview of Adaptive Heritage Re-Use’, Open Heritage, December 2019 <https://
openheritage.eu/resources/> [accessed 12 March 2021].
5. Examples include the international master of interior architecture in ‘Adaptive Reuse:
Exploring Spatial Potentialities and the Poetics of the Existing’ at Hasselt University (BE);
the MA and MDES in interior architecture focussing on adaptive reuse at the Rhode
Island School of Design RISD (USA); the MA programme ‘Continuity in Architecture’ at
the Manchester School of Architecture (UK); and the BA and MA in interior architecture
and design at the University of Lincoln, or the MS programme ‘Architecture, Built Environ-
ment, Interiors’ at Politecnico di Milano (IT). It is worth noting that the authors of many of
the principal works selected and discussed in this paper are involved in teaching at these
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institutions, notably Bie Plevoets and Koenraad Van Cleempoel at Hasselt, Liliane Wong at
RISD, and Sally Stone in Manchester.
6. Sally Stone, Undoing Buildings: Adaptive Reuse and Cultural Memory (London: Routledge,
2020), p. 4.
7. Previous literature studies have been developed within the disciplines of heritage conserva-
tion and architectural design with the overarching objective to identify approaches to the
subject that can underpin design strategies, or pinpoint overlooked areas worth further
study, including: Bie Plevoets and Koenraad Van Cleempoel, ‘Adaptive Reuse as a Strategy
Towards Conservation of Cultural Heritage: A Literature Review’, in Structural Studies,
Repairs and Maintenance of Heritage Architecture XII, ed. by C. A. Brebbia and L. Binda
(Southampton: WIT Press, 2011), pp. 155–64; and Plevoets and Van Cleempoel, ‘Adaptive
Reuse as an Emerging Discipline: An Historic Survey’, in Reinventing Architecture and
Interiors: A Socio-Political View on Building Adaptation, ed. by Graham Cairns (London:
Libri Publishers, 2013), pp. 13–32. An updated version of this literature review is included
in: Plevoets and Van Cleempoel, Adaptive Reuse of the Built Heritage: Concepts and Cases
of an Emerging Discipline (London: Routledge, 2019), pp. 7–27. A literature review by
Elena Vigliocco is included in the book by Matteo Robiglio, RE–USA: 20 American
Stories of Adaptive Reuse: A Toolkit for Post-Industrial Cities (Berlin: Jovis, 2017).
8. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities: The Failure of Town Planning
(New York, NY: Random House, 1961).
9. Cantacuzino, New Uses for Old Buildings; Eley and Worthington, Industrial Rehabilitation;
Walter Kidney, Working Places: The Adaptive Use of Industrial Buildings (Pittsburgh: Ober
Park Associates, 1976).
10. ‘Mapping of Current Heritage Re-Use Policies’, Open Heritage.
11. Further to the books discussed at the end of the paragraph on theoretical monographs, an
interesting and unusual example is the volume edited by Elisa Freschi and Philipp Mas,
Adaptive Reuse: Aspects of Creativity in South Asian Cultural History (Wiesbaden: Haras-
sowitz Verlag, 2017), which explores creativity in South Asian systems of knowledge, lit-
erature, and rituals.
12. Interesting exceptions include: Derek Latham, ‘Creative Re-Use: Working with the Build-
ing’, Journal of Architectural Conservation, 5.2 (1999), 7–23; Rafael Luna, ‘Life of a
Shell and the Collective Memory of a City’, Int|AR: Interventions Adaptive Reuse, 4
(2013), 30–5; Bie Plevoets and Koenraad Van Cleempoel, ‘Aemulatio and the Interior
Approach of Adaptive Reuse’, Interiors: Design, Architecture, Culture, 5.1 (2014), 71–88.
13. These include proceedings of recurrent subject specific conferences such as ‘Rehab: Inter-
national Conference on Preservation, Maintenance and Rehabilitation of Historical Build-
ings and Structures’ (2014, 2015, 2017, 2019) and Docomomo conferences, for
example, the Lisbon Conference that focused on Adaptive reuse in 2016. We have also
not included books ensuing from conferences, although see note 43.
14. Cantacuzino, New Uses for Old Buildings, p. 6.
15. Robert Klanten and Lukas Feireiss, Build-On: Converted Architecture and Transformed
Buildings (Berlin: Gestalten, 2009).
16. Chris Van Uffelen, Re-Use Architecture (Salenstein: Braun, 2011).
17. Pierre Thiebaut, Old Buildings Looking for New Use (Stuttgart and London: Axel Menges,
2007).
18. Antonia Edwards, Upcyclist: Reclaimed and Remade Furniture, Lighting and Interiors
(Munich and London: Prestel Verlag, 2015); and Antonia Edwards, Renovate Innovate:
Reclaimed and Upcycled Dwellings (Munich and London: Prestel Verlag, 2017). See also
<https://www.upcyclist.co.uk/> [accessed 1 March 2022].
19. Powell, Architecture Reborn.
460 Adaptive reuse: a critical review
Francesca Lanz and John Pendlebury

20. Building in Existing Fabric Refurbishment, Extensions, New Design, ed. by Christian Schit-
tich (Basel: Birkhauser Verlag, 2003).
21. City as Loft: Adaptive Reuse as a Resource for Sustainable Urban Development, ed. by
Martina Baum and Kees Christiaanse (Zurich: gta Verlag, 2012).
22. Phillippe Robert, Adaptions: New Uses for Old Buildings (Princeton, NJ: Architectural Press,
1989).
23. Frank Peter Jäger, Old & New: Design Manual for Revitalizing Existing Buildings (Basel: Bir-
khäuser, 2010).
24. Pier Francesco Cherchi, Typological Shift: Adaptive Reuse of Abandoned Historic Hospitals
in Europe (Syracuse: LetteraVentidue, 2016), p. 25.
25. Ibid., p. 21.
26. David Littlefield and Saskia Lewis, Architectural Voices Listening to Old Buildings
(Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2007).
27. Re-Cycle: Strategies for the Home, the City and the Planet, ed. by Pippo Corra and Sara
Marini (Milan: Electa, 2012). The book is the catalogue of the major exhibition on adaptive
reuse held at MAXXI — National Museum of 21st Century Art, 1 December 2011 – 29 April
2012.
28. Reduce Reuse Recycle: Architecture as Resource, ed. by Muck Petzet and Florian Heilmeyer
(Ostfildern and Berlin: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2012). The book is the catalogue accompanying
the exhibition ‘Reduce Reuse Recycle — Architecture as Resource’, German contribution to
the 13th ‘International Architecture Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia’. See also <http://
www.reduce-reuse-recycle.info> [accessed 21 November 2021].
29. Re-Cycle Italy: Atlas, ed. by Lorenzo Fabian and Stefano Munarin (Syracuse: Lettera Venti-
due, 2012). The book is one of the three main outputs of the three-year long national
research project ‘Re-cycle Italy’ (2013–2016) funded by MIUR (Italian Ministry for Research
and Education) in 2010 <https://recycleitaly.net> [accessed 21 November 2021].
30. Eley and Worthington, Industrial Rehabilitation.
31. David Highfield, The Rehabilitation and Re-Use of Old Buildings (London and New York:
Spon Press, 1987); see also Christopher A. Gorse and David Highfield, Refurbishment
and Upgrading of Buildings, 2nd edn (London: Spon Press, 2009).
32. Derek Latham, Creative Re-Use of Buildings (Shaftesbury: Donhead, 2000).
33. James Douglas, Building Adaptation (Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann, 2002 and 2006).
34. Robiglio, RE–USA.
35. Paul Meurs and others, Reuse, Redevelop and Design: How the Dutch Deal with Heritage
(Rotterdam: nai010, 2020).
36. Johannes Cramer and Stefan Breitling, Architecture in Existing Fabric: Planning, Design,
Building (Boston, MA: Birkhauser, 2007).
37. Ibid., p. 12.
38. Graeme Brooker and Sally Stone, Rereadings: Interior Architecture and the Design Prin-
ciples of Remodelling Existing Buildings (London: RIBA Publishing, 2004); Brooker and
Stone, Rereadings 2 (London: RIBA Publishing, 2019); Graeme Brooker, Adaptation Strat-
egies for Interior Architecture and Design (London: Bloomsbury, 2016).
39. Brooker and Stone, Rereadings, p. 13.
40. The same concepts are further investigated by the authors in several other publications:
Graeme Brooker and Sally Stone, Form and Structure: The Organisation of Interior
Space (Lausanne: AVA Publications, 2007); Brooker and Stone, Context and Environment:
Sites and Ideas (Lausanne: AVA Publications, 2008); and Brooker and Stone, Elements and
Objects: Occupying Space (Lausanne: AVA Publications, 2009).
41. The tasks include: the analysis and study of the building in relation to its history, architec-
tural structure, context, and the proposed new use; the intervention strategy, defined
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according to the relationship of the new project with the former spaces; the spatial and
design characteristics of the reuse project, concerning the spatial and material features
relating to the intervention.
42. Remodelling is ‘a formal intervention upon existing form’ where ‘the past takes on a
greater significance because it, itself, is the material to be altered and reshaped’; see
Machado, ‘Old Buildings as Palimpsest’, pp. 46–9. Machado’s seminal article has been
extremely influential in the development of the contemporary debate on adaptive
reuse, being up to today one of the most referenced and a key resource in scholarly
works on the subject.
43. Beyond the scope of this paper to review are the theoretical contributions found in a
number of edited books. Interesting examples include Terry Meade, Luis Diaz, and
Isobel Creed, OCCUPATION: Negotiations with Constructed Space (University of Brighton,
2013); the volume edited by Graham Cairns: Reinventing Architecture and Interiors;
Umbaukultur: The Architecture of Altering, ed. by Christoph Grafe and others (Dortmund:
Verlag Kettler, 2020), where a series of short theoretical essays by different authors are
followed by twenty-five ‘exemplary projects’.
44. Plevoets and Van Cleempoel, Adaptive Reuse of the Built Heritage, p. 2.
45. Ibid., p. 1.
46. Wong, Adaptive Reuse, p. 6.
47. Ibid., p. 126.
48. Ibid., p. 64.
49. The idea of Frankenstein and the Monster he created, as she states, owes more to Holly-
wood than Mary Shelley.
50. Fred Scott, On Altering Architecture (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2008).
51. Ibid., p. xvii.
52. Ibid., p. 176.
53. Ibid., p. xvii.
54. Ibid., p. 11.
55. Stone, Undoing Buildings, p. 19.
56. Ibid., pp. 32–52.
57. Graham Moon, Robin Kearns, and Joseph Alun, The Afterlives of the Psychiatric Asylum:
The Recycling of Concepts, Sites and Memories (Burlington and Farnham: Ashgate, 2015).
58. Julia A. B. Hegewald and Subrata K. Mitra, Re-Use: The Art and Politics of Integration and
Anxiety (New Delhi and Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2012).
59. See Joseph Alun, Robin Kearns, and Graham Moon, ‘Re-Imagining Psychiatric Asylum
Spaces through Residential Redevelopment: Strategic Forgetting and Selective Remem-
brance’, Housing Studies, 28.1 (2013), 135–53; and Robin Kearns, Joseph Alun, and
Graham Moon, ‘Memorialisation and Remembrance: On Strategic Forgetting and the
Metamorphosis of Psychiatric Asylums into Sites for Tertiary Educational Provision’,
Social & Cultural Geography, 11.8 (2010), 731–49.
60. John Pendlebury, Yi-Wen Wang, and Andrew Law, ‘Re-Using “Uncomfortable Heritage”:
The Case of the 1933 Building, Shanghai’, International Journal of Heritage Studies, 24.3
(2018) 211–29.
61. Phillipe Robert also uses the idea of palimpsest in Adaptions.
62. See Brooker and Stone, Rereadings, p. 11; Wong, Adaptive Reuse, pp. 8–28: Plevoets and
Van Cleempoel, Adaptive Reuse of the Built Heritage, pp. 20–3; Stone, Undoing Buildings,
pp. 4–5; and Douglas, Building Adaptation, pp. 1–9.
63. Plevoets and Van Cleempoel, Adaptive Reuse of the Built Heritage, p. 23.
64. Wong, Adaptive Reuse, pp. 30–2; see also Markus Berger, Heinrich Hermann, and Liliane
Wong, ‘Adaptive Reuse Today’, Adaptive Reuse — IntAR Journal, 1 (2009).
462 Adaptive reuse: a critical review
Francesca Lanz and John Pendlebury

65. Graeme Brooker and Sally Stone, for example, in their book What is Interior Design (Mies:
Rotovision Publishers, 2010) suggest that working within pre-existing buildings is the dis-
tinguishing nature and the specific realm of interior architecture itself: ‘Interior architec-
ture, interior design, interior decoration, and building reuse, they say, are very closely
linked subjects, all of which deal, in varying degrees, with the transformation of a given
space’, p. 46; see also: Occupation, ed. by Meade, Diaz, and Creed; Plevoets and Van
Cleempoel, ‘Aemulatio and the Interior Approach of Adaptive Reuse’; and Francesca
Lanz, ‘Re-Inhabiting: Thoughts on the Contribution of Interior Architecture to Adaptive
Intervention’, Journal of Interior Design, 43.2 (2018), 3–10.
66. Cherchi, Typological Shift.
67. The idea of adaptive reuse as translation has been variously proposed by different authors
writing on adaptive reuse. In particular among those considered in this paper: Scott, On
Altering Architecture, pp. 75–91; and Stone, Undoing Buildings, pp. 32–52.
68. Stone, Undoing Buildings, p. 52.
69. Terry Meade, ‘Occupation: Friction, Resistance, Negotiation’ in Occupation, ed. by Meade,
Diaz, and Creed, pp. 8–15 (passim).
70. Pendlebury, Wang, and Law, ‘Re-Using “Uncomfortable Heritage”’; see also Francesca
Lanz, ‘The Adaptive Reuse of Neglected Buildings’, in Contested Spaces Concerted Pro-
jects: Designs for Vulnerable Memories, ed. by Cristina F. Colombo and Jacopo Leveratto
(Syracuse: Lettera Ventidue, 2021), pp. 68–85.
71. Plevoets and Van Cleempoel, Adaptive Reuse of the Built Heritage, pp. 43–5.
72. Graeme Brooker, ‘Wastespace’, in Reinventing Architecture and Interiors, ed. by Cairns,
pp. 33–52 (pp. 45–6). Italic added by the authors.
73. Edward Hollis, ‘No Longer and Not Yet’, in Reinventing Architecture and Interiors, ed. by
Cairns, pp. 177–94 (p. 189).