It is a fitting form for what is something of a temple to recycling. In 2003, Kamikatsu became the first place in Japan to pass a zero-waste declaration after the municipality was forced to close its polluting waste incinerator. Since then, the remote village (population 1,500, an hour’s drive from the nearest town) has become an unlikely leader in the fight against landfill and incineration. Residents now sort their rubbish into 45 different categories – separating white paper from newspapers, aluminum-coated paper from cardboard tubes and bottles from their caps – leading to an 80% recycling rate, compared to the national Japan average 20%. Villagers typically visit the center once or twice a week, which is designed with public spaces and meeting rooms, making it a social hub for the sprawling town. It even has its own recycling-themed boutique hotel called WHY – which might be your first response when someone suggests staying next to a junkyard. The hotel at Kamikatsu Zero Waste Centre, Japan. Photo: kojifujii/Koji Fujii. Building for Change, gestalten 2022 “The question mark shape can only be seen from high in the sky,” says the building’s architect, Hiroshi Nakamura. “But we are hopeful that this city is re-challenging our way of life on a global scale, and that out-of-town visitors will begin to question aspects of their lifestyle once they return home.” The work is one of several such poetic pieces featured in Building for Change, a new book on the architecture of creative reuse. Written by architect and teacher Ruth Lang, it includes a global sweep of recent projects that make the most of what already exists, whether breathing life into antiquated structures, creating new buildings from salvaged parts, or designing with eventual dismantling in mind. The timing could not be more urgent. As Lang notes, 80% of the buildings projected to exist in 2050, the year of the UN’s zero-carbon goal, have already been built. Therefore, the critical onus on architects and developers is to retrofit, reuse and repurpose our existing building stock, using the ’embodied carbon’ that has already been spent, rather than contributing to escalating emissions with further demolition and new constructions. While the urgency of the issue has concerned the industry for some time – Architects’ Journal is leading the way with its RetroFirst campaign – the issue recently made national headlines when Michael Gove, then Communities Secretary, ordered a public inquiry into the proposed demolition of the 1929 Marks & Spencer flagship store on Oxford Street. While preservation of cultural heritage would once have been the primary reason for preserving such a building, preservation of the planet has now taken center stage. Campaigners argue the development proposals would release 40,000 tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere, while a low-carbon “deep retrofit” is extremely possible. They point to examples such as the former Debenhams in Manchester, a 1930s building being renovated and extended. To put the scale of emissions into context, Westminster City Council is currently spending £13 million retrofitting all of its buildings to save 1,700 tonnes of carbon each year. The proposal to demolish M&S alone would effectively undo 23 years of the council’s carbon savings. The water tower of Castle Acre in Norfolk. Photo: Taran Wilkhu, Building for Change, Gestalten 2022 Retailer bosses might do well to read Lang’s book for some inspiration and see how creative reuse isn’t just critical for the planet, but can be even more enticing than the promise of a shiny new build. Along with office and retail renovations, projects include a Shanghai rust factory reborn as a spectacular exhibition center, a water tower in Norfolk cleverly turned into a panoramic house in the clouds, and a children’s community center in a converted warehouse. complete with a dizzying new landscape that undulates its way around the building. The strategies presented range from ad-hoc to forensically designed. A German architect, Arno Brandlhuber, invited his friends to drill holes in the concrete walls of a former underwear factory near Potsdam using a sledgehammer, to create the windows of his new weekend home where they saw fit. In Barcelona, ​​meanwhile, architects Flores & Prats spent three months painstakingly cataloging every single door frame, mosaic tile and wall molding of a 1920s workers’ cooperative, creating a catalog of parts they will reuse in the building’s theater conversion. The duo compares their process to altering used clothes: “You have to dry out and thus recognize the pattern used before, cut on one side to add to the other,” they write. “We might need to sew some pockets and so on until the garment responds and identifies with the new wearer.” It’s an exercise, they add, that “takes confidence and time to get the hang of it.” The resulting Sala Beckett is an enchanting place, strewn with traces of his past lives, creating a series of rich spaces that would have been impossible to build from scratch. It’s brimming with one of the major freebies of retrofitting that so many new builds struggle to fake: character. Over the years, the cooperative has housed shops, a cafe, a cinema and a gym, and the echoes of these functions are preserved in a kind of bricolage of fragments. Richly layered and full of character… Sala Beckett, Barcelona. Photo: Adria Goula/Courtesy of Flores & Prats Arqs, Building for Change, gestalten 2022 The 44 doors and 35 windows recovered from the project were carefully restored, repainted and moved to different rooms, arranged in large openings and in new combinations, “as if choreographed in a dance around the new building,” Lang writes. The architects call their approach “situational architecture”, allowing the space to surprise and guide its development, suggesting alternative uses and evolving into its new form. While other architects had suggested demolishing the building and starting over, Flores & Prats saw the social value in preserving the structure, beyond the environmental benefits alone. “You inherit it,” Ricard Flores said in an interview, “you use it because you like what you see and you think there’s a treasure there. And not only in terms of material properties. The social heritage was just as important as the natural heritage.’ Similar principles guide the approach of the French couple Lacaton & Vassal, Pritzker Prize-winning architects who work under the cry: “Never demolish, never remove or replace, always add, transform and reuse!” The rehabilitation of post-war housing estates in Paris and Bordeaux has set a new bar for low-energy retrofitting, improving the buildings’ thermal performance while, crucially, allowing existing residents to live there while the works are being carried out. From social housing to art centres, the pair always start with a thorough assessment of the existing fabric, asking how it could be improved with minimal resources. In the early 00s, when the French state allocated €167,000 to demolish and rebuild each apartment, they claimed it was possible to redesign, extend and upgrade three apartments of the same size for that amount. They proved it by working with Frédéric Druot to transform the 1960s Tour Bois-le-Prêtre, removing the old precast concrete lining and wrapping the apartments in a three-metre-deep layer of winter gardens, providing additional amenity space and a thermal buffer. in living spaces. As Anne Lacaton says: “Demolition is an easy and short-term decision. It’s a waste of many things – a waste of energy, a waste of material, and a waste of story. In addition, it has a very negative social impact. For us, it is an act of violence.” Harrow Arts Center in London. Photo: Neil Perry/Building for Change/ Gestalten 2022 It’s a lightweight philosophy that can also be found in the work of London studio DK-CM, particularly their masterplan for the Harrow Arts Centre, set on a Victorian school campus, which features in the book. Rather than relegating existing uses to temporary structures at enormous expense to enable the creation of new art installations, the architects carefully reorganized the space and developed a phased approach over six years. Architectural decisions were made based on how they would reduce overheads and minimize the environmental impact of construction and future maintenance, with a program of strategic repairs and light interventions – a design process with “more in common with surgery than construction”, says Lang. The drive to conserve and reuse is catching on. Refurbishment is no longer seen as a last resort of economic necessity or a fringe ecological pursuit, refurbishment has become the desired choice for progressive clients. This month, the London School of Economics revealed the winner of its latest international competition, for a £120 million “last set” addition to its campus. Following a recent run of giant behemoths of brick, glass, steel and concrete, designed by a roster of star architects, the LSE…