Building upon: a designer's approach to adaptive reuse

With heritage policy stressing cultural significance extending in many cases beyond the material reality of an existing building towards intangible heritage, this paper seeks to put forward an alternative approach to those that emphasise a stable understanding of existing buildings as material artefact. The propositions described in this paper aim to promote new conceptual tolerances for creating architecture from existing buildings via a design research modality.

This paper sets out a speculative, design-oriented approach and methodology to mediating the relationship between intangible heritage qualities possessed by existing buildings and their agency towards the creation of new form for adaptive reuse. It describes the creation of mnemonic and metaphoric devices to mobilise and tease out these qualities via acts of oblique questioning and imaginative interpretation.

The specific case employed to mobilise this inquiry is the Union House building at the University of Adelaide, designed in 1969-1975 by Dickson & Platten. The re-reading and focus on a single building provides a consistent base as a starting point, allowing a clear mapping of a suite of design strategies, akin to a “theme and variations” approach found in musical composition.

The consistent premise is for a building realised in-situ through a new 2500m2 volume and selective demolition of the existing Union House. Re-readings of the existing building are conducted in search for distinctive points of departure emanating from the host building. Through various techniques, the generated propositions aim for “conceptual fidelity” to the host while articulating an expanded field of architectural qualities sourced in its existing condition.