Retrofit, Adaptive Reuse and the Risk of Getting Heritage Wrong
Robert Sharples is a Senior Conservation Architect at Bowman Riley. With over 15 years of experience, Robert has found a deep commitment to preserving heritage assets.
Adaptive reuse and retrofit are often used interchangeably. I acknowledge that both are approaches to working with existing buildings, especially traditional and historic, yet I often ask: what is the distinction between them? Can a project be both, and is it sustainable?
Adaptive reuse is about, firstly, changing use. It’s about giving a building a new purpose: an industrial mill transformed by the community, a church becomes a workplace, a block of stables used for residential. The challenge is to ensure that the core identity of any heritage asset and its setting are considered.
The biggest pitfalls can include not understanding the building’s condition well enough and expecting too much from what an asset can truly deliver. A proposal must think imaginatively about the content of a building’s character, history and significance. An assessment of significance undertaken by a specialist seeds this understanding.
To retrofit traditional and historic buildings, to me, this is more about improving performance. It’s about energy efficiency, user comfort and building longevity. Think thermal calculations, internal and external wall insulation, roof, window and door upgrades.
Development can be misplaced and unsustainable when the design doesn’t consider building pathology. How does a building breathe? Where does the moisture go? When is it appropriate to use vapour-permeable materials? All to ask, why does it matter to performance?
Minimal intervention can be a missed trick, and sometimes one solution over another can be detrimental. Similar to adaptive reuse, the starting point must be assessing significance, namely building fabric. If the windows are historic and of interest, the designer should think holistically, prioritise conservation, and prepare options based on their impact. I don’t believe adaptive reuse and retrofit are mutually exclusive. The main difference I see is that retrofit is more objective than Adaptive reuse – a science, let’s say.
A retrofit project could overlook the idea of place. I do believe a project can be both if negotiated properly. For me, both adaptive reuse and retrofit are about telling a story. I like to feel a building’s history just as much as to seal its future performance. Today, we are challenged with developing existing building stock sustainably against a balanced agenda of short and long-term benefits.
As we challenge more of our historic and traditional buildings in how we use and improve them, retaining their heritage value is ever more important. Understanding not just what we change, but to understand why we change and understand will it cause harm?