Never Demolish

In Spring 2024 the Independent School for the City together with the International New town institute, organised an international symposium on demolition, or rather: on learning to live without it.

Some twenty years ago a movement started to stop demolishing buildings altogether. What started out as a fringe statement, that was sometimes mistaken for being merely provocative but was actually deadly serious and meant to be taken entirely at face value, has now blossomed into a serious position to be taken by building owners, architects and planners alike.

Whereas twenty years not demolishing an existing building when confronted by a functional need, was arrived upon when the existing building seemed excessively precious, historically important, large or otherwise ‘special’. Saving buildings for their intrinsic and unique value is however no longer the issue being discussed. The point now is that even – or especially – normal buildings, mediocre, ugly, banal buildings, i.e. all buildings, should be saved. Not because they have a unique meaning, beauty, size or shape, but because they are already there, and demolishing them would mean wasting material, capital and embedded CO2, in order to spend even more material, capital and CO2.

There is a radicalism to this new position in designing, building and development that seems too dumb to be true. In fact it punctures the balloon of the rationality equating change and progress with the cycle of demolition and construction, with a filtering process of historical architecture that is too unique to demolish. In this way we have learned to accept our cities as an everchanging sea of buildings that get replaced according to the clock of technical progress, material degradation and financial depreciation, with some islands of historically important relics, frozen in time.

Architecture, with its devotion to the uniqueness of design objects, and to technological modernity, is doubly implicated in this ever changing and ever modernising city. But it is out of architecture that comes the simple but shocking proposal to adopt conservation as a the default position, and deploy their creativity and technological resources to adapt, not to replace. This is a conceptual leap that found its first markers with the statements, and the projects to back them up, by the French office of Lacaton & Vassal, when they published their manifesto against demolition in 2004, alongside with concrete projects to not demolish the high-rises from the sixties and seventies in the French banlieues, but to make them better, bigger, lighter, more beautiful and liveable, sometimes without even temporarily removing the inhabitants. L. & V. continue to hammer their statement home with unambiguous statistics that illustrate the absurdity of the demolition-construction cycle, for example that since 2003 2,98 billion Euros have been spent by demolishing 113.200 houses, while 12,64 billion has been spent on building 105.000 new ones, meaning that 15,62 billion has been spent on a net loss of 5.200 houses. Lacaton & Vassal even went as far as stating publicly that they would any job that implies the demolition of existing buildings, firmly defining their position as ideological.

The symposium in Rotterdam can be seen as gathering of architects and developers who have all followed up on this radical departure and have brought it into practice from a whole range of different methodological positions, also with different levels of ideological intensity on the scale set by Lacaton & Vassal.

The Amsterdam architect and mathematician Peter van Assche of SLA, arrived at the conclusion that the human race has developed into a misfit on planet earth, using more materials than it actually needs, maximising its footprint to the detriment of other species and the very geo-biological equilibrium of earth itself. Architects play a central role in this deviant wastefulness, designing the very buildings and infrastructure that over the last 200 years have caused 55% of the waste we leave behind. They remain naïve or even wilfully blind about their responsibility while designing things that will be replaced and turned into waste 40 years hence.

Van Assche approaches this problem not by a refusal to demolish, but by a commitment to reuse, recycle or even upcycle building materials that have been left behind and by using materials that can be endlessly reused. In his practice he combines design services with companies that buy up waste such as plastics or even abandoned gravestones, and recycles them into high quality and esthetically unique products like terrazzo or tiles, which he either deploys in his own projects or sells them to others. While Van Assche agrees with the idea of abolishing demolition, he does in the meantime work within the reality wherein demolition is one of the sources of a whole range of potential new building materials.

Van Assche and SLA focus on the material dimension of demolition and building, on the molecules, crystals and synthetics of waste material. There is also a whole other dimension that defines the problem, that of finance, from mortgages to insurance policies, building budgets to global investment portfolio’s. To argue for a simple consideration of the possibility of re-use over re-place, takes a deep dive into the intricacies and often perverse mechanics of the financing of building projects. Mevrouw Meijer is a foundation that works with schools to use architectural research and design to adapt their decades old buildings to the new requirements of teaching and climatology. Behind the scenes of their architectural work there is however a whole project to understand and peel apart the financiall arguments that still push schools to abandon their often surprisingly well designedexisting buildings, for new real estate that is often mediocre and expensive, but brand-new and freshly financed. WouterDeen, the ‘CFO’ of Mevrouw Meijer, explained how the normal life-cycle process means postponing investment until renovation of the existing building to reach the carbon neutral performance of the building becomes prohibitively expensiveand demolition becomes the only option. By rearranging the life-cycle budgeting, the major costs for building anew can be brought forward and spent to radically adapt the existing building, thereby reaching the same technical performance, in a building that retains its meaning for the community, and that does not waste the embedded carbon of its original construction. Deen’s painstaking deconstructions demonstrate how the financial constructions that drive the demolition or adaptation choices can be treated as design problems in themselves, to be picked up by architects.

Overlapping, but not identical with finance is policy. The architect and researcher Sanne van Manen undertook a massive and systemic analysis of the existing housing policy, based on the identified need for 1 million extra homes to be built over the next decade. Van Manen deconstructed the number in different categories. One part is because houses need to be replaced because they are going to be demolished, one part is because the number of households is increasing, because they are getting smaller and there are more singles. One part because the net amount of people is increasing. Then she looks at how this housing need can be fulfilled. Vacant buildings can be transformed into housing, second houses could be discouraged and become primary dwellings, the demolition of existing houses could be abandoned. The largest source of homes, 50% of the needed number, could come from the subdivision of large homes inhabited by small households or single inhabitants.

In other words: the entire number of 1 million extra homes could be realized without applying for building permits or doing any new build projects. The radical move made by van Manen is simply to not immediately translating need for extra homes into the need to build new homes. Finding new homes in the existing building stock carries with it an enormous amount of positive effects. First: the current environmental obstacles to acquire building permits because of the nitrogen emission crisis can be circumvented. Secondly: 22 megaton of co2 can be saved. Thirdly: no new land, natural or agricultural, needs to be sacrificed.

Van Manens scheme hinges on the idea of subdividing large houses into smaller ones. This can be done on the smallest one on one scale of homeowners selling of their top floor to another family, to housing corporations subdividing entire neighborhoods of terraced housing into smaller units, more befitting the shrinking households. What it requires is an easement of permit giving for splitting homes. There are spin off effects however that make the exercise even more worthwhile: the splitting, topping up and otherwise intensifying the use of the existing building stock also gives the opportunity to make the homes sustainable, energy efficient of passive, accessible for the impaired and fit to be used as care homes. This alone could save billions in costs of home care and heating. Lastly: intensifying and rejuvenating the population of the catatonic terraced streets in Dutch new towns and suburbs, could bring in more shops, schools and other centers of public life.

The subdivision project is now finding more and more interest with local and national governments and with housing corporations. A pilot project is being prepared to be implemented together with the International New Town Institute.

Finding space, instead of building space, is where the approach of the Belgian architecture office RE-ST meets that of Sanne van Manen. The principal of the office, Dimitri Minten redefined design task from addition of space and materials, to the seeing of potential in the existing built matter. For a project where a housing project was to be demolished because the ceilings were too low, RE-ST stated that with windows from floor to ceiling, wintergartens and replaced elevators the building would be better than new, while saving 20% of the costs. Similarly, the council of Vorselaar was saved the building of a new library building, by using the hardly used dining hall of an emptying nunnery as a place for reading and borrowing books and having public meetings.

REST faces a double challenge with their attitude about discovering potential in existing buildings. First there is the challenge to the accepted mechanics of budgeting, financing and planning that heavily bias new buildings, and therefor demolitions, notwithstanding the undeniable higher costs. Secondly they face the challenge of the payment structures to architectural design, as a percentage of the building budget, thereby incentivizing architects to propose new construction and demolition. REST has demonstrated to possibility for clients to pay their architects even when they save them money. This can be seen as a breakthrough.

The ultimate stress test of the ‘never demolish’ attitude might be when it is implemented by public policy. ‘Implement’ might be too simple a word for what Kristiaan Borret, the publicly appointed City Architect of Brussels tries to do. With a combination of suggesting, convincing and regulating, Borret has overseen projects where entire gigantic office towers have been stripped and reclad, instead of demolished and rebuilt. One regulation he could use was that a new building on that site would never be allowed to have the height of the existing one. From another angle Borret used smart architectural design to prove that higher quality could be reached by reuse and restructuring than entirely new constructions could ever produce. From project to project, developer to developer, the public official in the capitalist city, tries to creates facts on the ground that count as evidence for an approach based on adding layers to the city, instead of stripmining its urban tissue.

Borret acknowledged that he could build on the gradual mainstreaming of the practice of re-use by projects before and around him, but that in the end the pubic authority’s unique power to regulate and legislate is needed to infuse building projects with anything more than the private interests of the user, developer and investor.

Overseeing the range of experiences and practices, going from the molecular to the urbanistic, it becomes clear that there is an extraordinary amount of evidence and accumulating knowledge for a design practice based on re-use instead of replace. The projects discussed here demonstrate that architectural creativity and innovation lies rather in the transformation of buildings and materials, than in the creation ex nihilo of new structures. There is a potential path for architectural design to proceed on into the future, that takes a sharp left turn from the accepted trajectory of unique and discrete novel objects.

On the other end of the spectrum, that of functional and financial conditions, there are models and strategies that can even solve the most stubbornly quantitative challenges, without having to demolish or even build anew. Slowly but surely, dents and cracks are appearing in the armor of creative destruction thinking, that protects the status quo of the demolish-rebuild practice. Will we soon reach a situation where the default decision for a worn building is not to demolish it, but to transform it? And will we ever reach the situation where the default position for a new functional need, is not to design a new construction, but to see an opportunity in an existing one and transform it?

Despite all the evidence and experience, we are not there yet. The challenges lie not on the level of the possible, the doable or the preferable, but on the level of vested interests and of cultural imagination. It is simply not in the interest of a great many powers and institutions to switch from demolition-rebuild to re-use. Simply put, one of the most important functions of new architecture is to create speculation opportunities. Buildings are embedded capitalism, and the money-changing function of ever changing architecture is larger than the value of existing buildings in terms of material and users.

If we want re-use to become the default position in a new status quo, we will have to bend the rules and regulations that temper capitalism towards the material value of architecture, away from its ephemeral speculative value. Architects will not play a central role in this political struggle. Voters, activists and politicians will.

Architects can play a central role however in another systemic change, that of the cultural imagination. Architects are important as producers and testers of models for the future. They not only create images of the future, but they also use the city and the countryside as laboratories to test them out incrementally, project by project. They conjure up images of the future, while demonstrating that they are actually buildable and livable. It is here that lies a huge opportunity, to challenge our deeply ingrained idea of the future as one of a succession of shock like transformations, wiping everything away and starting over. What we need is a vision of the future, equally entrancing and optimistic, that embraces the material legacy of the past centuries, but infuses them with new social and cultural function and meaning.