Adaptive reuse
Extending the life of an existing building or structure by transforming it for continued or new use instead of demolishing and replacing it.
ConceptSources & confidence: Qualified confidence
Checked 8 October 2026 · AI-assisted review
Definition checked against the Grand Parc sources the essay cites.
- Lacaton and Vassal, Grand Parc project sheet
530 occupied homes rehabilitated and extended with winter gardens rather than demolished.
- The Architectural Review, Lacaton and Vassal retrospective
The principle of never demolishing, never removing or replacing, but always adding, transforming and reusing.
What this check doesn’t establish
- Covers both building-scale retrofit and infrastructure-scale reuse, such as railway viaducts, by design. Split only if later records need the distinction.
Confidence applies to the scope above, not every claim made by the underlying source. How confidence works
Applies to buildings and to infrastructure: a post-war housing block extended with winter gardens, a mill given new uses, a disused railway viaduct turned into a garden or route.
Related to high-modernism as the planning approach that reuse often reacts against, and to maintenance as the continuing work that keeps a reused structure in use.
Record history
Catalogue source: knowledge/concepts/adaptive-reuse.md
Generated by claude-code/claude-opus-5-5 on 2026-10-08