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VELUX EDITORIAL RE-NEW
Cities are like living organisms. They remain alive by continually renewing themselves. Just as the human body’s lifespan exceeds that of its individual cells, a town generally outlives its individual houses defensive walls and factories. Buildings age over time. They become unusable or no longer meet increasing expectations about comfort and space. Sometimes they are simply not impressive enough for new users or functions. These circumstances make the desire for something new only too understandable. But there are good reasons for not acceding to calls for renewal invariably and unthinkingly. Renovating an old building uses up to two thirds less material than an equivalent new building – saving the equivalent amount of energy for producing and transporting materials, as Thomas Lemken writes in his article for Daylight&Architecture. Many old buildings additionally possess unrivalled construction qualities – whether a “bonus” in terms of room height and width or details and decorations in the workmanship no longer found in new buildings. Often, however, these aesthetic qualities are hidden, and it takes the work of an architect to bring them to light. In his article “More space, more light” in this issue, Hubertus Adam describes how this can happen. However, existing buildings in our cities and villages also represent an unparalleled challenge. Badly insulated old buildings are among humanity’s greatest energy wasters. While only a percentage of buildings in Central Europe are renewed annually, regulators – as David Strong demonstrates in his article – primarily have new buildings in mind when establishing energy efficiency standards. In the current issue of Daylight & Architecture we look at all these facets of renovating existing buildings: their spatial qualities and their often hidden beauty, their equally well-hidden dormant energy and material resources, and the question of how much renewal is economically necessary, and of how much of it is ecologically justifiable. Our authors have also looked into how the changing expectations of end users – for instance, a wish for more daylight - favour the renewal of buildings. VELUX was actually created as a result of this desire for renewal. More than 65 years ago in 1941 - the Danish engineer Villum Kann Rasmussen was asked by an architect office to develop a roof window for a small school building in Denmark. He set out to create a roof window that was as good as the best vertical window in every respect. He succeeded - and invented the first modern roof window - as well as he introduced the idea of utilising the volumes under the sloping roof. In this issue the Danish photographer Henrik Kam has followed the routes of historic steam ships from Liverpool to Rotterdam via New York, documenting renewal and decay, progress and stagnation. All three harbour cities have big plans for the future involving converting industrial brownfield sites, run-down working-class areas and other social problem zones into desirable residential areas. Often this leads to a dramatic coexistence of old and new, with glazed tower blocks rising over derelict industrial ruins, or valuable lofts next to boarded-up workers’ houses marked down for demolition. This coexistence, however, is only a natural expression of a natural renewal – cell for cell and house for house – of our cities. In the thousands of years in which cities have existed, this process has not lost its fascination. Enjoy the reading!
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