Framing Renovation returns in collaboration with the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Ljubljana within the context of the 2024–25 LINA Architecture Program, featuring contributions by Wael Al Awar and Rafal Sliwa; Adjoa Armah; Thordis Arrhenius; Diana Berecz; Caitlin DeSilvey with Vanessa Ruhlig; Gulio Gallassio; Milos Kosec; Maria Kremer and Maria Gunko; Maria Luiga; Adam Przywara; and Leonid Slonimskiy, Artem Kitaev, and Gili Merin.
Today, renovation is, above all, a political act. It has become one of the key ecological practices transforming the culture of architecture. No longer merely a means of preserving historic buildings, renovation now stands as a fundamental challenge to the logic of erasure and replacement that has dominated the construction industry for over a century. As we confront the consequences of environmental disruption—widely understood by many as a form of class struggle—and the reality of warfare on a historically unprecedented scale, the question of renovation becomes more than a technical concern for the preservation of cultural property inherited from the past.1 In a world shaped by environmental, political, social, and economic crises, renovation is no longer about selective acts of preservation, but about reclaiming the relevance of architecture.
The Stockholm Resilience Centre’s Planetary Boundaries framework defines nine critical Earth system processes that represent the safe operating limits for human activity, the crossing of which undermines Earth’s capacity to self-regulate. In 2023, at least six planetary boundaries, such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and land system change, have been transgressed far beyond safe limits.2 Architecture and the construction sector are deeply implicated in these breaches. The materiality of modern architecture, dominated by carbon-intensive materials such as concrete, steel, and glass, has played a significant role in accelerating ecological degradation. Modernist architectural concepts transformed fossil fuels into form, rendering carbon visible in the language of walls, grids, and towers across the globe.
Architecture’s carbon logic is also a logic of profit. It is entangled with systems of power that prioritize capital over community and profit over the environment. The industries that support it—from real estate to finance to resource extraction—are deeply invested in a model of unlimited growth, driven by the imperative to build anew. Renovation, in this context, offers a pathway to redistribution. It invites practices that value leftovers not as obsolete, but as resourceful; that prioritize maintenance over monumentality, and community over consumption. Renovating means resisting the imposition of the new and engaging in meaningful dialogue with what already exists: with materials, history, the scars of the past, and the possibilities of the future. Every structure that is kept standing is a refusal of the extractive industry. Every reused material is an act of defiance against waste.
Renovation is also about dignity. It is about enabling people to grow older in their homes, their neighborhoods, their memories. It is about creating architectures of care—spaces that are accessible, familiar, and open to change. As half of all European cities face population decline and aging demographics, renovation offers a way to adapt existing buildings for accessibility, multi-generational living, and aging in place, reducing the need for costly institutional care. It can also address housing affordability by transforming vacant or underused housing in shrinking towns into affordable homes, especially through cooperative or co-housing models. Many European cities already have more buildings than they will need in the future. Rather than constructing more, focus could be oriented toward making existing structures more livable, equitable, and accessible.
To transform the culture of architecture and construction requires immense effort. It means relinquishing old privileges and reimagining professional roles. It means redesigning institutions, retooling industries, and rewriting regulations. It means going beyond the boundaries of architecture and seeking out new modes of spatial and material practice. It means relearning and reeducating how to value the imperfect, the incomplete, the inherited. Renovation can be reimagined today as a radical act—a confrontation that is political at its core, challenging the bloated and uncritical notion of progress with every intervention. This is not the future of glossy renderings, but of situated repair. Not of heroic architecture, but of collective ingenuity. Today, to renovate is to be subversive.
