Don't Build, Rebuild The Case for Imaginative Reuse in Architecture

In a time of climate crisis and housing shortages, a bold, visionary call to replace current wasteful construction practices with an architecture of reuse

As climate change has escalated into a crisis, the reuse of existing structures is the only way to even begin to preserve our wood, sand, silicon, and iron, let alone stop belching carbon monoxide into the air. Our housing crisis means that we need usable buildings now more than ever, but architect and critic Aaron Betsky shows that new construction—often seeking to maximize profits rather than resources, often soulless in its feel—is not the answer. Whenever possible, it is better to repair, recycle, renovate, and reuse—not only from an environmental perspective, but culturally and artistically as well.

Architectural reuse is as old as civilization itself. In the streets of Europe, you can find fragments from the Roman Empire. More recently, marginalized communities from New York to Detroit—queer people looking for places to gather or cruise, punks looking to make loud music, artists and displaced people looking for space to work and live—have taken over industrial spaces created then abandoned by capitalism, forging a unique style in the process. Their methods—from urban mining to dumpster diving—now inform architects transforming old structures today.

Betsky shows us contemporary imaginative reuse throughout the world: the Mexican housing authority transforming concrete slums into well-serviced apartments; the MassMOCA museum, built out of old textile mills; the squatted city of Christiana in Copenhagen, fashioned from an old army base; Project Heidelberg in Detroit. All point towards a new circular economy of reuse, built from the ashes of the capitalist economy of consumption.

Aaron Betsky is a critic of art, architecture, and design and the author of over twenty books on those subjects. He writes a twice-weekly blog, Beyond Buildings, for Architect Magazine. Trained as an architect and in the humanities at Yale, Mr. Betsky has served as the Director of the Cincinnati Art Museum and the Netherlands Architecture Institute, as well as Curator of Architecture and Design at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

INTRODUCTION
The Principles of Imaginative Reuse

PART I: FOUNDATIONS

CHAPTER 1
The Architecture of Remains: A Short History of Reuse

CHAPTER 2
Dumpster Diving and Urban Mining: The Materials of Modern Reuse

PART II: TRADITIONS

CHAPTER 3
Ephemeral Architecture

CHAPTER 4
Ghost Architecture: Building from Accumulations of the Past

CHAPTER 5
Squatting, Installing, and Activating

PART III: USES

CHAPTER 6
Housing: Re-inhabitation

CHAPTER 7
An Architecture of Doing Nothing

CHAPTER 8
Reusing the Landscape

CHAPTER 9
The World of Imaginative Reuse: Clubs, Community Spaces, Markets, Shops

CHAPTER 10
The Monuments of Imaginative Reuse (Built from the Monuments of Industry)

PART IV: BEYOND BUILDINGS

CHAPTER 11
Faking It: Constructed Situations

Conclusion
Acknowledgments
A Note on Sources
Notes
Index