Dumber than the Romans

In a recent talk for the City Club of New York, Françoise Astorg Bollack shared an indignant litany of major demolitions. The Tombs, an eighty-two-year-old detention complex in Lower Manhattan, was to begin its dismantling any day, to be replaced by a slightly larger tower. In Midtown, 270 Park Avenue, a fifty-two-story glass skyscraper that served as JPMorgan Chase’s headquarters for sixty years, was leveled to make way for the bank’s new digs. Most egregious was the erasure of the Hotel Pennsylvania—the world’s largest hotel in the 1920s—for a tentative supertall project trollishly named PENN15, which developer Vornado has since abandoned. “Who knows how long the site will be empty,” Bollack said, of the prime real estate directly across from Penn Station, the country’s busiest transit hub. “It’s puzzling why this very large building could not be reused for housing. And this is just the tip of the iceberg for demolitions.”

Bollack, an associate professor at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, is well-versed in the possibilities of transformation. Her notable projects include restorations and additions to New York’s state capitol in Albany and the gradual renovation, over twenty-five years, of a nineteenth-century public school building into the LGBT Community Center in Greenwich Village. Her published writings and activism have challenged the status quo of historic preservation, arguing that our built heritage should not become fossils enshrined in amber, but fertile, motley canvases on which to build anew. Her latest book, Old Buildings, New Ideas: A Selective Architectural History of Additions, Adaptations, Reuse and Design Invention (2023), offers a culminating vision of this thesis through thirty-two case studies plucked from over 1,500 years of Western architectural history.

Today, virtually every midsize city displays the commoditized kitsch of architectural reuse. Coffee shops in converted barns. Corporate offices tucked into old warehouses. An upscale bar staged in a retrofitted church or bank vault. Big-box stores repurposed into community centers. Rather than seeing these juxtapositions as a uniquely postindustrial idea, or a product of postmodern aesthetics, Bollack reveals that they follow a rich tradition that dates from ancient times, via a panorama of before-and-after illustrations, blueprints, and annotated photographs. Readers learn how the abandoned amphitheaters of ancient Rome were left for ruin as the empire was “torn apart by civil wars, invasions, and epidemics”; after intermittent use as quarries for stone, the stadiums nurtured makeshift homes, buildings, and gardens on both sides of their walled grounds, eventually growing into new towns. In the countrysides of France and England, medieval castles, originally built with moats and towers for self-defense, became sprawling domestic showpieces for a flailing elite. And in New York’s Soho district, amid the grungy counterculture of the 1960s, the old textile factory was reimagined as “the loft apartment,” itself a re-creation of the nineteenth-century artist’s studio, and now a global symbol of fashion and money.

Bollack’s collection provides a vocabulary for recognizing these adaptations. In the early 1900s, the humble two-story, Greek Revival temple of Boston’s old Custom House became the base of a thirty-two-story skyscraper, a “parasite” transformation that kept the old structure while creating more office space to meet increased shipping activity. (Today, it houses a Marriott time-share.) Architectural “weavings” reclaim and stabilize a ruin, exposing and even enhancing its weathered aesthetic; at Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theater, restored in the 1980s after decades of decay, designers went so far as to repaint the stage’s brick backdrop in a rust color and fire guns into it. In the book’s most provocative entry, Bollack applauds the work of Georges-Eugène Haussmann, the nineteenth-century French official who “inserted” the broad avenues that gave modern Paris its distinctive shape, a costly and brutal intervention that arguably helped preserve much of the medieval city.

Old Buildings, New Ideas offers a quietly radical observation: that many of humanity’s most recognizable landscapes are not brand-new structures designed by a single architect, but hybrid works in progress made by multiple authors and collaborators over time. Bollack’s main subjects are not so much the Vasari Corridor or the Passage des Panoramas or the Maison de Verre, but the new design approaches conceived in their haphazard constructions: the superblock, the shopping mall, the glass house. While her writing is focused on discussions of style and technique, Bollack alludes to the social and material factors driving these interventions. In earlier epochs, reuse was the product of necessity, a way to seek shelter or cobble together new buildings with scarce materials. During the Renaissance, the tradition became self-serving, with ambitious princes and lords reclaiming the designs of antiquity to bolster their public profiles. In the postwar period, as environmental concerns loomed and the failures of urban renewal crystallized, artists forged the beginnings of a modern bricolage and DIY movement. One example, Robert Motherwell’s 1947 home and studio in East Hampton, New York, is assembled from surplus army Quonset huts, reclaimed greenhouse parts, local plywood, and discarded industrial furniture.

Less discussed in Bollack’s wide-ranging analysis is arguably the biggest reason for reuse: the sunk costs of embodied carbon. As global urbanization steams ahead, the stakes of reuse are planetarily existential. Construction generates one-third of emissions and half of all material waste. Developers can either adapt and preserve a shred of hope of curbing rising temperatures—or ignore responsibility as their pollution levels explode. In the introduction, Bollack nods to this renewed consciousness in the twenty-first century, noting the recent 2021 Pritzker Prize, awarded to Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal, whose motto of “Never demolish!” guided a slew of ingenious public housing retrofits, “wrapping” existing units with enclosed winter gardens and balconies. She concludes, “This time, it is not the destruction of a revolution, or the devastation of a world war that has alerted us to the value of our existing world, but the real threat of extinction posed by the climate crisis.” And yet, the thread ends there. Even in the book’s most recent examples, the urgent perils of emissions or waste hardly enter the picture. In the early 1980s, when Pepsi-Cola’s old New York headquarters dodged the wrecking ball—through the deft addition of a forty-one-story, mixed use extension—it was simply because the owners harbored nostalgia for Gordon Bunshaft and Natalie de Blois’s original 1960 design.

In some ways, Old Buildings, New Ideas already feels old. Aside from a few pointed paragraphs at the outset that engage our present crisis, the book’s main content could have been published decades ago. Several case studies and design concepts were featured previously in Old Buildings, New Directions (2013), a first attempt at Bollack’s thesis that includes fewer techniques but more contemporary examples. In both cases, the written thread is light on detail around environmental impact, preferring to stew in the nuance of architectural style. It’s a missed opportunity to engage this age-old subject and make it new again. If reuse has historically been a somewhat marginal cause, today it can feel more relevant than ever. The postpandemic, post–Paris Agreement crossroads demands both urban reinvention and greener construction methods. Recent data from the American Institute of Architects found that retrofits surpassed new construction billings in 2022, an inflection not seen since the Great Depression. The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitats will take up the question of “New or Renew?” at its 2024 conference this fall. Nearly a dozen US cities, and many more abroad, have launched office conversion programs to incentivize new uses, spawning premature accolades from local news.

I say premature because, as Bollack noted in her blistering City Club talk, our behavior can be heroic one moment and moronic the next. For every FiDi office conversion, or Domino factory retrofit, or asphalt plant–turned–gymnasium, there are countless low-rise tenements, midsize skyscrapers, and entire city blocks routinely leveled to build luxury condos and offices, the last things our cities need. In my suburban hometown north of Chicago, I’ve seen empty strip malls demolished, only for truckloads of fresh cement to be poured, creating the foundations for new ones down the road. I’ve seen boxy corporate offices razed and replaced by boxy distribution centers; old football stadiums wrecked in favor of newer, smaller stadiums. Developers are still trying to revive our zombie shopping mall, inserting movie theaters, boozy arcades, trendy restaurants, and upscale apartments to create a walkable island of faux urbanism.

Why can’t we learn to make reuse our default mode of development? Do we fully appreciate the potentially dire consequences of these concepts sitting on the shelf, unapplied on a warming planet? Bollack shies away from tackling such questions directly. The book offers a tool kit of proven techniques, assuming, perhaps naively, that its audience is eager and ready to put these ideas into action. But we can’t forget that reuse is always at risk of being sidelined, overlooked, or deemed too impractical. As real estate in the twenty-first century grows more valuable and overleveraged, as Samuel Stein argues in Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State (Verso, 2019), there are ever-fewer fringe landscapes in which to squat and tinker. Today’s billionaire tycoons are shameless techno-optimists, inspired and spurred on by shiny glass towers and arbitrary LEED standards while ignoring the brute math of embodied carbon. By some estimates, global development patterns are resulting in the urbanization of more than 20,000 American football fields’ worth of untouched land every day. There’s too much to lose in repeating the same lazy modernist shortcuts, continually erasing the past to build an eternal present, at detrimental cost to the planet and our collective memory.