Preserving and repurposing
General description
The continued use of existing buildings, their renovation, and upgrading is associated with significantly lower energy and resource consumption than demolition and new construction. Strategies of preservation and repurposing prevent waste and include the following value-preserving or value-enhancing construction measures for existing buildings: maintenance, repairs, modernisation, conversions, extensions, and reconstruction.
Examples
CRCLR
Berlin, Germany
Construction within an existing building consists of extra challenges regarding the realisation of the reusability concept. The key objective of the project was the preservation of the existing building. Fire protection requirements made the change of many openings necessary, for example, the doors had to be a minimum of 120cm wide, leading to the problem that a lot of the existing structure could not be reused.From this perspective, the approach was to build with layers, considering that the structural elements should have the longest lifetime. If new materials had to be used in the structure, the team used concrete as an element with the longest lifespan. Facades and inner construction had a higher priority in terms of application of reusable components, and also the focus here was on the demountability of components to ensure deconstruction and future changes of space use.