Editorial

Figure 1.

Repurposing.

(© J.C. Duffy/The New Yorker Collection/www.cartoonbank.com)

The adaptation of preexisting structures to answer changing needs has enriched human history throughout time. Such structures—whether natural or designed artifacts—provide challenging topography for creative revitalization that can sustain and even enhance historic continuity. Historians, sociologists, anthropologists, archaeologists, and others examine its effects from different perspectives. Designers, architects, landscape architects, and planners working within the field of historic preservation deal with its manifestations at scales ranging from buildings and their individual interiors to an urban and even regional scale of cities and landscapes. Schools of architecture might do more to address this issue rather than leaving emerging practitioners less prepared to address design issues of adaptation and the theoretical foundations that underlie them.

"Adaptive use" and "adaptive reuse" (seemingly interchangeable in the manner of "flammable" and "inflammable") are terms most often used to describe such work, but of late "repurposing" has gained in popularity. Perhaps it is an apt characterization of more offhand examples, such as the growing numbers of shopping mall conversions recently described in the New York Times.¹

Predictably for this journal, submissions deal primarily with built artifacts and designed landscapes, offering critical evaluations that sometimes challenge current practice. Steven W. Semes thus argues persuasively for integrating rather than differentiating additions to historic fabric, using Rome to illustrate his points. The 1964 Venice Charter's recommended approach of differentiation that Semes cites has been widely incorporated into more recent guidelines, and I agree that it has led to a misuse by those who seek too energetically to register their own imprint.

Gregory Donofrio and Daniel Bluestone question adaptations of urban clusters that emphasize material preservation at the expense of cultural values, voicing understandable concerns over a change of character through adaptation that obscures original uses that are themselves historic: Donofrio's example, a local market in Boston; and Bluestone's, the tobacco industry in Richmond. Dealing with adaptations of building clusters more through planning than design, and with clusters of a different sort—college campuses, in which historic uses remain more or less intact—Nancy Rogo Trainer draws on approaches developed by her firm, VSBA, LLC (formerly Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates), and uses Haverford College as her case study. Cultural adaptation of a more forgiving, and more profound, sort than questioned by Donofrio and Bluestone is the focus of Diana Wylie's article on preservation in Oran, Algeria.

Newer examples of adaptation suggest an approach more sympathetic to original use than those earlier examples cited by Donofrio and Bluestone. Recent articles have illustrated works of adaptation through insertion, an approach leaving the historic shell of a structure, and sometimes the sense of its original use, untouched. For example, a new structure inserted within an historic pavilion in Mexico City, designed by Enrique Norten of TEN Arquitectos, has been effectively adapted as the Chopo Museum, enriching the history of a 1902 pavilion originally erected in Germany, then moved to Mexico, where it became the national Museum of Natural History and underwent other changes before its most recent conversion.² In Paris, an even gentler insertion within Charles Garnier's Opera (1860-75), a new element reportedly fully removable from its historic setting, houses L'Opera Restaurant, a use that complements the opera itself. Designed by Odile Decq Benoit Cornette Architectes Urbanistes, it was completed in July 2011.³ Fully contained within an historic shell that remains untouched, it contrasts with their work in Rome that Semes describes.

Elsewhere, newer adaptations of commercial or industrial buildings suggest that concerns of Donofrio and Bluestone are being addressed, with those buildings' original functions not only acknowledged, but even celebrated. In Basel, a former gas station and automobile shop has been adapted as a gallery known as the Von Bartha Garage, its original signage and gas pumps left as a record of its former use. Designed by Voellmy Schmidlin Architektur, it opened in 2011.⁴

Adaptations of industrial sites to public parks have commanded much recent attention, especially the celebrated High Line in New York City, designed...