68 IA&B - MAY 2009 1
ETHICS OF REUSE Vani Bahl stresses upon the adaptive reuse of historic structures, which are an important contributor towards the preservation of the physical, cultural and socio-economic energy of a place.
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oday’s renewed interest in ‘green society’ should heighten attention to the ethics of adaptive reuse, as a cornerstone of sustainability. Now that the idea of recycling waste has permeated our culture, we should adopt the slogan, ‘recycle wasted architecture.’ After all, architectural residue from the past is a repository of vast physical, human, and cultural energy. Construction costs are growing, we can’t afford to rebuild the environment over every generation. By every accepted economic index, including increased tax revenues and increased business activity, recycling in architecture proves its viability. The need for adaptive reuse of historic buildings is not only cultural, but in today’s economic climate- a necessity. Ironically many attributes of traditional buildings and patterns of development have been recognised as indigenous, renewable, logical responses to climate and easy on fossil fuels; and are being championed as ‘green’. Even urban planners have projected that a city of 2050 will look a lot like a development of 1850. However these historic, inherently sustainable, models are being replaced
by buildings which are energy hogs. LEED 1 which has become the only tool to evaluate energy efficiency of buildings in USA, Canada, and even in a few projects in India, accounts for only 2 points in 69 for the reuse of buildings. BREEAM 2 , like LEED, lacks in effectively considering performance, longer life cycles, and embodied energy of historic materials. In India, the seventh largest country by geographical area and home to one of the oldest architectural legacy, the Archaeological Survey of India has only 3650 historic monuments and archaeological sites protected under its guidelines. It has been pointed out that the State of Uttar Pradesh, which has roughly the same area as UK, has only 863 ASI protected monuments which is miniscule when compared to UK’s 500,000 listed buildings.
CONSERVATION OF PHYSICAL ENERGY Preservation, restoration, and rehabilitation in architecture cause much less destruction to our natural resources than new construction. To appreciate this, architects must be sensitive to the Life Cycle Assessment studies- energy used in