renovation

For the past few months, our office has been working on a renovation project. We're basically gutting the heck out of an existing building, cleaning up the circulation, widening some public spaces, giving the exterior a much needed face lift and doing our best to make the interior spaces inhabitable.

Adaptive reuse is one thing in theory, its execution is another. Most days I want to get into a bulldozer and push the existing building away. In the midst of all the headache (from both the design and business side of things) it's hard to stay positive. No matter how much we dream about creating beautiful new spaces and work and rework the design, we are constrained within the boundaries of the existing skeleton. Unfortunately for us, what we have to work with isn't all that pleasant. The sad thing is it would actually cost the same amount of money (or possibly even less) to demolish and start from the ground up.

So why not start over? why not make something from scratch?

Well, in our particular case, the new laws in this region make it impossible for us to fulfill the clients needs without keeping the existing structure of the building. A renovation would allow us to keep all 10 floors of the building allowing 600+ inhabitants to sleep and rest in these spaces. A new design would limit us to 5 floors and would cut the occupancy by more than half.

But enough about architecture. The desires to run away and start anew is prevalent. We just have to hope that underneath the seemingly hopeless surface we can find something of value, something worth holding on to.