OLD AND NEW BUILDING - ADAPTIVE REUSE

In this twenty-first century modern world, people always support and implement Go Green, and strive for natural sustainability to create a better life for future generation. But as we know that, our earth are facing serious problem such as global warming, destroy of natural ecosystem due to human activity. These bad effect will not only harmful to human health but the worst thing is we are getting closer to doomsday. So, many solution was suggested to solve this problem,aiming to reduce, reuse and recycle waste, human find new hope in everything, from bottles and boxes to clothes, vehicles and buildings.

The most important thing in our life beside food is shelter,which we name it as building. So, to protect our environment, my opinion is we better to adaptive reuse of old building rather than demolish and replace with new building. Different heritage building have different culture value, adaptive reuse of historical building should based on it heritage significance and value. Developer should clearly understand the background of the building ,and then develop the building to give it a new purpose.

The article I could find to defend my point of view is ‘The green dividend from reusing older buildings’ by Kaid Benfield. In his article, he mention that the greenest building is one that is already built. This is because we do not need to use environmental resources in demolish and constructing its replacement. Preservation Green Lab for Historic Preservation conclude that it can take between 10 and 80 years for a new, energy-efficient building to overcome, through more efficient operations, the negative energy and climate change impacts caused in the construction process. The greatest environmental benefits of reuse are achieved by minimizing the input of new construction.

Even though now we are in high technology world, the used of new eco-construction technique and Go Green concept was implement in most of the new building, but the cost and environment destroy was also increase. What’s the point to those people replacing an existing building with a new building and yet taking high cost and harmful to the environment? They supporting Go Green but the things they do is opposite.Find solution and be more innovative rather than recreate a thing, this is what a designer suppose to do!

Adaptive reuse heritage buildings brings lots of benefits. The first benefit is to save our environment. This is because by reusing buildings, their embodied energy is retained, making the project much more environmentally sustainable than entirely new construction. The second benefit is bring up the economy of a city. Historical buildings is the symbol and a landmark of a country, for example the Tiananmen Square in China, which bring in thousand of visitors per day, if without this historical building, the amount od tourism will decrease and the economy of China also decrease. Last but not the least,  adaptation of heritage buildings presents a challenge to architects and designers to find innovative solutions, producing some excellent examples of creative designs that retain heritage significance.            

Save our earth, save our future ,save the world! We, as a designer have the responsibility to save our environment starting from adaptive historical building!