DON'T BUILD, REBUILD

In a time of climate crisis and housing shortages, a bold, visionary call to replace current wasteful construction practices with an architecture of reuse

As climate change has escalated into a crisis, the reuse of existing structures is the only way to even begin to preserve our wood, sand, silicon, and iron, let alone stop belching carbon monoxide into the air. Our housing crisis means that we need usable buildings now more than ever, but architect and critic Aaron Betsky shows that new constructionoften seeking to maximize profits rather than resources, often soulless in its feelis not the answer. Whenever possible, it is better to repair, recycle, renovate, and reusenot only from an environmental perspective, but culturally and artistically as well. Architectural reuse is as old as civilization itself. In the streets of Europe, you can find fragments from the Roman Empire. More recently, marginalized communities from New York to Detroitqueer people looking for places to gather or cruise, punks looking to make loud music, artists and displaced people looking for space to work and livehave taken over industrial spaces created then abandoned by capitalism, forging a unique style in the process. Their methodsfrom urban mining to dumpster divingnow inform architects transforming old structures today. Betsky shows us contemporary imaginative reuse throughout the world: the Mexican housing authority transforming concrete slums into well-serviced apartments; the MassMOCA museum, built out of old textile mills; the squatted city of Christiana in Copenhagen, fashioned from an old army base; Project Heidelberg in Detroit. All point towards a new circular economy of reuse, built from the ashes of the capitalist economy of consumption. Aaron Betsky is a critic and teacher living in Philadelphia. Previously, he was professor and director of the School of Architecture and Design at Virginia Tech and, prior to that, president of the School of Architecture at Taliesin. A critic of art, architecture, and design, Betsky is the author of over twenty books on those subjects, including 50 Lessons to Learn from Frank Lloyd Wright, Making It Modern: The History of Modernism in Architecture of Design, Architecture Matters, and The Monster Leviathan: Anarchitecture.