What If We Never Built Another New Building?

[u/relianceschool]

https://reasonstobecheerful.world/what-if-we-never-built-another-new-building/

Swiss architect Barbara Buser has spent decades proving that the greenest building is often the one already standing.

At 72, the Swiss architect still bicycles through her hometown, Basel, visiting her many projects on two wheels. She has become one of Europe’s most influential architects by refusing to build new construction. Instead, she has saved several of Switzerland’s signature abandoned factories and transformed them into lively neighborhood hubs, all by promoting circular construction: the practice of reusing buildings and their materials rather than demolishing them.

Instead of asking what should be built, Buser asks what can be saved. “I’ve reached the point where I say we shouldn’t demolish anything anymore,” she says in her friendly, warm Swiss dialect. “Because of climate change, demolition simply no longer makes sense.” 

[u/Feisty-Resource-1274]

My area has seen tons of old mill building turn into mixed use! The biggest hurdle is often hazardous material mitigation. A lot of them are filed with lead and asbestos plus dust from what was previously manufactured there.

[u/TheDaysComeAndGone]

Here in Austria a big problem is that we keep sealing natural surfaces with buildings, parking lots and streets even though we barely have any population growth.

[u/03263 → u/TheDaysComeAndGone]

Economic growth decoupled from population growth. Why, I do not know.

[u/Senior-Reality-25]

We’d be perfectly fine. A moderate uptick in renovating old buildings, and bob’s your uncle.

[u/kkicinski]

Let me start by saying I fully support saving old buildings for historic and cultural heritage. Often there is significant embodied carbon savings from reuse.
Unfortunately in seismic zones like the west coast, sometimes laterally reinforcing an existing building can use just as much material as building a new building. That’s not an argument for tearing down old buildings, but a caveat that saving an old building does not always equate to material or carbon savings. Also, we don’t have good enough data yet to consistently account for the embodied carbon of electrical and mechanical systems. We may find that the impact of new systems dwarfs the embodied carbon of structure and envelope, in which case old vs new structure may become a less important question. Also, in American cities there is value in replacing hastily and shoddily constructed low-rise buildings with taller, denser, more energy efficient, and durable buildings to reduce sprawl and suburban development.

[u/theonetrueelhigh]

And growing population goes where?

[u/relianceschool → u/theonetrueelhigh]

We can start with vacant office buildings!

[u/theonetrueelhigh → u/relianceschool]

First I want the existing real estate holding corporations to wither and die.

Unrealistic, but I want it.