As architects and designers work to reduce the building industry’s outsized contribution to the climate crisis, Harvard Design Magazine 53 argues that the reuse and repair of existing structures offer architects and planners a vital path forward—one that keeps cities alive and responsive to their inhabitants.
Guest edited by architect Jeanne Gang and historian Lizabeth Cohen, Harvard Design Magazine 53: "Reuse and Repair" engages the practice of reuse across multiple scales—from individual buildings to downtown streets to the regulatory frameworks that organize urban life. Bringing designers and planners together with mayors, educators, artists, and scholars from fields including urban and architectural history, disability studies, sociology, and ethnography, Gang and Cohen open a conversation about how designing toward a low-carbon future can align with the wider work of caring for and remaking cities and society.
Common themes have emerged. Rehabilitating existing structures can save between 50 and 75 percent of embodied carbon emissions compared to new construction. Governments and institutions increasingly recognize this significance, enacting incentives and regulations to encourage reuse and curb the building industry’s carbon pollution. Yet as Daniel M. Abramson observes, the idea that a building can become “obsolete” has for more than a century given real estate developers powerful incentives to build anew. The architectural profession itself—as well as the schools that populate its ranks—continues to promote the notion that creating new buildings is architecture’s highest expression. As Eric P. Mumford explains, architects who design formally distinctive buildings from scratch have long been rewarded with the most lucrative commissions and accolades.
Still, interest in reuse, repair, and reinvention is gaining ground within architecture and planning. Reuse has long challenged strict notions of architectural authorship, exposing how design is often a collaborative process involving different architects, inhabitants, and many other stakeholders over time. Chris Cornelius offers a framework rooted in Indigenous values that asks how design might change if buildings and landscapes were regarded as our relatives. A striking example of architectural collaboration can be seen in a new design commissioned by the magazine for a languishing public pavilion on Chicago’s lakefront—a temporary structure originally designed by Ultramoderne with structural engineer Brett Schneider for the 2015 Chicago Architecture Biennial. Kwong Von Glinow’s inventive reinterpretation of the pavilion exemplifies the promise of collaborative practice as buildings age.
Compelling cases of reuse also show that the longest-lasting buildings are often those most open to change. Brian D. Goldstein reflects on the work of J. Max Bond Jr., whose flexible housing allowed residents to make the world in their own image. David Gissen and Georgina Kleege bring a disability perspective to Philip Johnson’s Glass House, examining adaptations Johnson made to accommodate his own impairments. Revisiting her childhood home in Josep Lluís Sert’s Peabody Terrace at Harvard, Imani Perry recalls how the complex’s Brutalist architecture “‘worked’ well . . . even when it didn’t seem to.” Welcoming “a spectrum of Black life,” its design helped imbue her early years with a sense of community that endures. Perry’s essay is accompanied by a new series of photographs by the artist David Hartt.
Access to the benefits of reuse, however, is not equally distributed. In Detroit, Sharon Cornelissen surveys white middle-class newcomers repairing “abandoned” homes, noting their “privilege to be forgetful about dispossession, expropriation, and the neighborhood’s past.” Elsewhere in the Rust Belt, Mayor Jamael Tito Brown of Youngstown, Ohio—a city still struggling 50 years after the steel industry’s collapse—describes the near-Sisyphean task of reuse and repair at an urban scale.
Catastrophic events also reveal reuse’s limits. After wildfires swept through Los Angeles earlier this year, residents returned to unsafe air, land, and homes. Christopher Hawthorne moderates a conversation with a group of experts—including Los Angeles Deputy Director of Planning Arthi Varma—on the implications of reuse for public health and community rebuilding. Reframing crisis as the rule rather than the exception, Eve Blau leads a conversation exploring reconstruction in war-torn Ukraine, suggesting that in an age of disruption, building and rebuilding are becoming indistinguishable.
Certain building styles also provoke strong public responses, requiring careful explication of their encoded histories, cultures, and ideas. Concrete modernism is one example. Considering buildings fatally caught between the cutting-edge present and the idealized past, Roberto Fabbri explores the preservation and demolition of modernist concrete structures from the 1960s and 1970s in the Gulf states. In the United States, campaigns to tear down Washington, DC’s Brutalist buildings have gained momentum. Angela M. Person reflects on how this oft-maligned style gains new appreciation when treated with care and imagination.
A release event featuring the guest editors as well as contributors Daniel M. Abramson and Kwong Von Glinow (Lap Chi Kwong and Alison Von Glinow) will take place on October 22 at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
Jeanne Gang is an architect and founding partner of Studio Gang, which has offices in Chicago, New York, San Francisco, and Paris. She is also the Kajima Professor in Practice of Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Lizabeth Cohen is a historian and author of many books, most recently Saving America’s Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age. She is also the Howard Mumford Jones Research Professor of American Studies and former dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.
For subscriptions and purchases of individual copies, please visit the Harvard Design Magazine website. Harvard Design Magazine is an architecture and design magazine that probes at the reaches of design and its reciprocal influence and impact on life and culture. Harvard Design Magazine is published by the Harvard Design Press at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and is led by Editor in Chief Ken Stewart and Managing Editor Meghan Ryan Sandberg.
