Time to make a change: when adaptive reuse begets positive transformation | News | Architonic

When you’ve made a mess, it’s often easier to hold up your hands and start again from scratch. But while it might be a harder way to do it, adaptive reuse – when architecture takes something old and broken and brings it back to life – can have benefits all round. When planning much-needed social and cultural buildings for public use, instead of using new, virgin materials (or even recycled materials that need to be collected, stripped, reformatted and transported), there are plenty of pre-made sites already in place. All we have to do is see them. These adaptive reuse projects take disused buildings, forgotten projects and unloved environments and transform them into something new, bringing life, positivity and purpose.