BDP Podcast

Hello. I'm Alan Davis. I'm an architect and Heritage Lead at BDP. Welcome to the first ever BDP podcast series. It's called Old Buildings New Beginnings. 

In this series, we discuss the current thinking relating to the use of old and existing buildings. We will discuss topics including adaptive reuse, sustainability, accessibility, improving performance as well as the cultural significance of keeping old buildings.

Why build new when you can repurpose the old? Welcome to the conversation.

So welcome to Old Buildings, New Beginnings, where this week we're considering how we as architects bring buildings back to life. We live in a time of change, and the global pandemic has accelerated that change. As we emerge from the pandemic we need to adapt, and our buildings will also adapt. From adaptive reuse of historic structures to retrofit projects in modern buildings, there are more options available to us and to our clients than ever before. Retrofit and refurbishment seems like the obvious choice, but is it more cost effective? And can we deal with historic buildings, buildings with heritage value? Can we retain the important character and history of these buildings? 

With me today, I have three architect directors whose work involves adaptive reuse.

Firstly, to Dev Mehta at our BDP Toronto studio, Bruce Kennedy in our Glasgow studio and Mike Camden in the Manchester studio. Welcome to you all. 

Mike, you know, it sounds as if the drivers for change in education are changing almost before your very eyes. Things the pandemic has changed in the education sector. Can you just tell us a bit about that and how the needs of the universities are changing?

I can do my best, yeah. So as an education sector, we're looking at a lot of companies that were built in the lot in the late sixties, early seventies, when there's a real boom in education in the UK. And, you know, many of the campuses are now finding that their building stock is tired, in need of a physical kind of upgrade because the buildings, the facades, the infrastructure are just tiring. But also, things have just really moved on. Requirements of the 21st century education facility are generally quite different. Probably was in the 1970s. So one of the buildings we have completed recently is the refurbishment to the old Students Union among the Metropolitan University and it's conversion into a new institute of sport, so a research teaching building.

And it is quite interesting looking at the old building that it was in its day. It was incredibly successful as student’s union really, really kind of strong list of bands who played there. Everything from U2 through to the Cure, Simple Minds to Nirvana, probably some of the more famous ones through the eighties. But much of it didn't work. I mean, things like the bar and the dance floor were up on the first floor. So as various regulations around sort of fire requirements that had changed, it just became more and more difficult for the university to operate. Plus I think the whole requirements around what the university was wanting out of the students union has shifted in the 50 years since it was built.

So initially the building was earmarked for demolition. It's in quite a key point within the city on Manchester Oxford Road knowledge corridor, but the university asked us to do a number of feasibility studies to look at it and say well what else could it be? How else could you bring it back to use?

Can we get some more life out of it? So ultimately we did, we looked at some studies. We looked at how we could fit the brief as a sports research institute into there and develop a structure for how it could work, looked at the benefits from both the cost point, but also from a carbon saving were really significant by retaining as much of the existing concrete frame, some of the cladding as possible, but really breathing kind of new life into it and getting it to work and giving the building probably another 50 years’ worth of life.

I think the needs of universities were changing steadily already with the, you know, the advent of fees in the UK going back few years now. Then, students start becoming a lot more discerning about what they were getting out of their education and therefore what they want there that facilities to provide. But I think one thing that's been really accelerated by the pandemic is the shift away from the reliance on sort of didactic lectures to transmit a huge amount of education through towards having much more space for students to be involved in self-directed learning, social learning, a much more active learning, proactive learning than the many students could previously provide.

So I think I think what we're seeing is a real shift in terms of increasing spaces that were sort of the in-between spaces. So they're no longer just about sort of formal learning spaces or formal labs. it's a real growth in spaces for students to inhabit them between lab sessions, between lectures, but also going into the evening and to really kind of colonize, to make their own and to use where they can work in many ways as kind of a student office, I guess, rather than taking work back to their bedsits or their halls of residence.

So one of the challenges is to say, well, how can we kind of get that space in? And I think it was accelerated by the pandemic for a couple of reasons. One, when it is demonstrated to universities that shifting lectures online can be very successful, there is success stories. This is some institution which found that a lot harder.

But what it does, it gives students a real opportunity to kind of go back and revisit lectures kind of on and off. But therefore, it does question whether the live lecture and a big lecture theatre is always needed or whether there's a better way of doing it. But actually, if students are therefore able to access a lecture offsite and remotely at any time of day or night, why should they come to campus?

So therefore, creating facilities that really bring them to campus and make them want to spend time on campus because those people to people skills are really important both for their learning but also for their future employability is really key. So how can we do that? How can we create spaces? And in many ways, I think revitalizing existing buildings because of some of the, you know, the cost benefits and the carbon benefits is an effective way of producing that new type of space.

Yes. I think the first project I'd like to talk about is Aberdeen Music Hall. I mean, I think certainly the cultural drivers are really important to the client and we're very much in the forefront of our minds as we approached the project because I think what they were tending to find this for many, many types of performance, that a dwindling audience, the venue itself felt as if it was probably stuck in the mid-20th century in terms of its presentation, its’ sort of look and feel and its ambience and the cafe takings were down and it was more difficult to be able to stage the types of performances they wanted to be in the main spaces.

So very much it was about bringing in new audiences, making the building much more accessible to a much wider cross-section of the community whether that be younger people or middle aged people that, you know, just spreading accessibility, culturally and socially as much as physically and there was certainly a physical accessibility issue, which is also very common to heritage buildings. And that many of them were designed at a time when issues about physical accessibility were certainly not in the forefront of people's minds.

And now, of course, we want buildings to be as inclusive as we possibly can and again, the adaption of the heritage structures in the way that is sympathetic in order to ensure that you're providing the maximum accessibility is absolutely key in these projects. 

So physical accessibility, cultural, social accessibility are kind of hand in hand certainly on that project and actually thinking about another project that we've dealt with recently in Glasgow at Queen Street Station, we had a fantastic opportunity there to have a category A listed building at the heart of the project, which is the original train shed that was designed by James Carswell in the middle of 19th century.

And the structure is one of the highest listing value in Scotland. And it’s seen as a national important structure, single-span iron train shed, a fantastic building to be involved in and the good thing about it is it’s still serving the same function as it did when it was first built which is always fantastic actually in buildings. So still very relevant in 100, 150, 170 years on and what we did there of course was to respond to again change in the railway environment so a push towards decarbonisation, more of a push toward accommodating more passengers on the railway and of course this was pre-covid.

Of course, we’re all still hoping and expecting that there will be a robust return to public transport as people become more confident again. But there was an increase in passenger numbers from about 19 million to 38 million per annum by 2042. And so the challenge there was to get longer trains into the station and in order to do that, what had to happen was the platform needed to be extended and that pushed the public concourse out of the James Carswell trainshed and toward the street, south. So our challenge became how do you then replace that passenger concourse and with through a lot of analysis, pedestrian floor analysis and so on to determine the best form and location for that and that allowed us to make a justified case for the removal of some fairly unattractive 1960’s and 1970’s buildings that certainly had no heritage value and were pretty much unloved by the people of Glasgow. And what that allowed us to do then was to put a big glazed frontage, effectively the station concourse became a big living room to people living in the street, which also then addresses the principal public space in Glasgow’s George, the principal civic space so some of the station is opened up the city and the city to the station, which is a fantastic experience.

So when people come off the train from Edinburgh or from the Highlands, rather than your first impression of Glasgow being Burger King that you see at the end of the concourse, you’re now looking out and seeing George Square and the civic buildings beyond. So it's really been a fantastic transformation. And of course, the new building has been designed as an entirely new contemporary expression. But what we were able to do as part of that was also strip away all of the accretions that had happened to the A-listed train shed over the years and reveal its original structure in its original integrity by making it virtually free-standing surrounded by a new building. So a big driver for that was understanding the history of the site and understanding the nature and the integrity of the original building and then trying to reinforce that setting we had created within the original building.

Great. Dev, if I can bring you back to the drivers, it sounds as if the drivers are structural changes, economic changes, industries declining, industry starting which we've seen a lot in the UK in the latter part of the 20th century. 

Is that a significant driver in other projects in Canada? Or what else do you see as the main drivers for change which may bring about adaptive reuse?

Yeah, I think there are a number of drivers. Industry change, certainly we have over the decades converted a number of factory buildings, toy factory, candy factory in downtown Toronto and of course the shoe factory buildings that have kind of run their life but offer extremely flexible plans and structure that can be reused. I'd say quite easily in a sense.

So that's certainly a bit of it, I would say. Looking ahead, one of the big changes that we will see will be, I think, a combination of our kind of importance on understanding that the different aspects of sustainability, the main item being embodied carbon and understanding those the same, that the most sustainable buildings are the ones that already exist.

Of course. So reusing significant elements and components of existing buildings I think will be more appealing but will also likely be required as policies shift to understand embodied carbon. So I think that's going to be a very huge component. When thinking about the Bata shoe factory in particular, really what was maintained was the concrete structure of the building, but it's a significant amount of embodied carbon and I think looking ahead, speaking from a North American perspective, so much of what we built is tailored to automobiles, the storage of automobiles, for example.

I mean, you think of the average, let's say new high density multi-unit residential building in an urban centre, you know, for every let's say on average for every one residential unit, you have one parking space that's built. And as the units continue to shrink for affordability and for various reasons, the parking space doesn't shrink given the configuration and size of the car.

So you're looking at roughly a 300 to 350 square feet or about 30 square meters dedicated to a parking space. And in the future, and for a number of reasons, I think we can assume that private automobile usage will dwindle. And so I think looking ahead, we really have to carefully consider what we do with all of these either below grade or above grade parking structures that are largely built out of gas and place concrete and have tremendous embodied carbon in them. So I think that will be a big challenge, but a great opportunity.

Yeah, I think there's two really interesting points there Dev that overlap with what we're looking at as well. I mean, the first is very much about the low carbon design that for clients that already own a lot of buildings then that is, you know, a massive consideration. You know, can they start off by not demolishing something?

How much of something current can they retain? I know on the Institute of Sport, we retained all of the structure and we retained the facades to the north elevation partly because very difficult to build against a motorway and over cladding. But the analysis suggests we've saved the equivalent carbon to running a new building for 12 years.

So that's quite a notable benefit I think you know today if we decided to a 50 year life then you know nearly 25% of the building's running cost is already absorbed just by saving you know the facade. Sorry, saving some of the structure with some of the facade and I think for major landowners we're going to see that that as a growing consideration and analysis and testing to be done right from day one to say what are the benefits of keeping this.

That's a very interesting metric which would be useful to repeat for any 20th century building retained.

I'm interested Dev, in the use made of the industrial factory itself. You mentioned the overall setting and the opportunities there for an attractive environment, but the industrial building itself was converted to, to what uses?

So space standards are more generous than new build, I guess. Are there any other advantages that you can see from re-use? 

This is an open question to all three of you. Any other advantages apart from sustainability? We've discussed space standards from reusing buildings rather than building new.

You know, again, I think it depends on the nature of the structure, but very many buildings we deal with and this particularly may be the case in the case of public buildings are also a repository of memories for people. So I think they create a place in society. It's identity, a sense of place. You know, in the case of building a Music Hall, perhaps that's a more obvious analogy in the sense that many people, maybe met there, had their first kiss, had their first dance, and enjoyed a particular concert.

It sits with them forever. So these buildings are really important to society and we have a responsibility to deal with those, to recognize that as architects we don't own those buildings to do as what we want, they’re owned by the wider community and we have a part to play in the redevelopment. I think that's an important aspect.

Well, this touches on issues of significance. What we generally, when we talk in heritage terms as significance and there are various ways of measuring heritage significance and in UK guidance in legislation, there are four values discussed which are aesthetic or architectural, historic evidential, what it tells us about the way people lived and community value, and I think you've touched on in particular there on community value.

And I guess Michael would say the same for his new building and the bands that play there, you know, that the community that that related to was students of a certain periods or throughout, say, an extended period, and in Dev’s that case, the people who actually emigrated and set up that place and then their descendants after that.

So the significance I think would be interesting now to discuss how we retain that character or how you've retained that character, or that memory in the buildings that you've worked on. 

I’ll come back to you Dev, is in converting and it's quite a bold conversion from a big expansive space to residential but I guess it just serves a bigger community now. Are there any particular ways that you've sought to retain that character, or do you think it's inherent in the architecture and the architecture is strong enough?

Yeah, I mean, it's funny, when thinking about the factory building itself, about a shoe factory, when we demolished essentially all the exterior interior components and retained a concrete structure, which is a very simple I mean it's vertical circular columns with essentially like a hollow core cast in place slab. You think it's really open to do whatever you want with it.

However, architecturally, every design move we made was so proscribed by the existing structure and informed every single thing we did to the smallest detail. So I'll give you one example. In converting to residential, a big addition to the building was installing new balconies onto the exterior, which were foreign elements to the building. And a factory building wouldn't have balconies.

And the easy thing to do would be to bolt steel cantilevered members to the columns that are expressed on the outside of the building as we kind of drew that up. And we were working very closely with the late Sonia Bata, who we called Mrs. Bata, and we showed her the sketch and we knew immediately it just felt wrong.

It wasn't the right thing to do because the vertical columns were such an important expression on the exterior of the building. So we really had to think creatively about how to add a balcony to this building that really responded to the character of the existing building. So we had to carefully kind of insert these steel members that cantilevered from the inside of the floor structure and had a precast balcony piece that had shared the exact same depth and kind of proportions of the beams on the exterior and all these kind of nuanced details.

It was a very, very complicated kind of surgical thing to do on the building. It looks very seamless though, in how it was integrated into the look of the building. But there's really, you know, thinking back on it, no other way we could have done that. And what it does is it creates these very kind of bespoke details. You couldn't take that balcony and put it on any other building. And I think the act of working with existing buildings just forces you to respond to the existing building in unique ways. 

Yeah. And that's a very specific architectural response which is worthy of any listed building. I forget if you said that it's scheduled in any way, but the approach is clearly one that applies to listed buildings.

Bruce, in terms of keeping that memory of youth and culture, was there any way that you were able, apart from preserving the building, conserving the building, keeping it in use, were there any specific moves in terms of referencing that earlier life?

I think when you approach existing structure and particularly scheduling of a structure, it's really important to do some research and really understand what the building is about, understand the context historically and understand what it means to people today. And we were fortunate, certainly in Aberdeen, for instance, which is the project I mentioned earlier, that the client is already done quite a bit of work in the run up to the project happening so they'd already surveyed audiences to find out what they thought was good, what was bad about the building. As we began to approach construction, as we were still designing we were beginning to gather information from members of the public and people who'd used the buildings over years so that would include photographs of, you know, their granny at a dance in 1920, whatever it may be, or photos of them the 1970’s at a rock concert.

So they were beginning already to gather this repository of the importance of what this actually means that people of Aberdeen. And I think for us that was really important to understand the past and to ensure that what we did with the building left a legacy but still incredibly recognizable to people, so that they didn't come back and felt their connection with the building had been lost, and I think a lot of that is about articulation, which is obviously a really important principle as well in the approach to the design of listed buildings.

So whether it was something that was good that had integrity, that had historic heritage value then obviously we were very careful to preserve that, to give a new setting that we had revealed, whether that be architectural lighting, even just things as simple as picking the appropriate colour scheme of the juxtaposition of new and old elements that would these, these elements of the heritage building maybe were revealed to people in the slightly different ways given their perspective, something they hadn’t seen perhaps for years.

And I think that was well received when the people came in and still felt connected to it. 

Well, some of it's about memory, but some of it is about, I think, looking at these buildings and thinking physically, what opportunities can they create that you wouldn't necessarily have if you were building a particular brief from scratch? 

So for instance, at the former students union at Manchester Met, we had the dance floor as a double height space right within the middle of the building, you know, what could we do with it?

So we look quite hard at the brief, some of the labs we you know, we tried to analyse what the brief needed, what they wanted to do that may actually benefit from that. And ultimately, they had a biomechanics lab that always wants to be able to move vertically through space rather than just across floor plates based on the floor, actually move up steps across beams and see how people move, and analyse how people moved vertically.

So looking at this double height space, all of a sudden we could create this double height lab for them for zero extra cost because it was there. But it enabled the brief to expand and really offered a new way of looking at the activities that could take place. Similarly, the outside of the building was previously full of a whole series of external steps, terraces, balconies, which were a headache.

They were very difficult to maintain. They generally leaked because there's just so many different interfaces. So one of the things that the university were keen to not retain in the existing building was those, and we just kind of look at how we could get rid of them. But rather than getting rid of them, what we ultimately did was we expanded the facade of the envelope around them to internalize these various steps and then they became some of the self-directed learning spaces. So again, you've got essentially a series of free double height spaces, Atria, which overlap, they looked into each other. And it created a really nice set of internal arrangements that joined the whole building back together in a really kind of cohesive way.

Yeah, and I think those constraints can really drive innovation as well. You know, we put labs into the existing building and at a glance you'd say the floor to floor heights aren't enough. But by looking at the kind of the services that are required for contemporary a lab, whether there's air handling services or gases or various things, generally drive a much greater floor to floor height than this building had.

But so what we tried to do that was turn that to 90 degrees to have sort of as a service wall so that rather than going out at the top of rooms, we went out to the back with air handling services. But that also meant that we had much shorter duct runs. We saved money in all those ducts as services, we saved money on what the height of the building would be against that kind of a new building. But all of that was innovation because of the constraints, and I think that's, that's quite exciting to be able to do rather than just deliver what is considered, I suppose, the best practice solution at any particular time.

So what we're getting is a picture of how reusing buildings can add richness and variety and layering and layering of meaning and the patina to existing buildings. 

I think if we can finish by just discussing what our architectural approach is and I think I know the answer to this, Dev has already touched on the care needed in dealing with existing buildings. We have a tradition in BDP and more widely of constructive conservation of clearly articulating new interventions, that is still the prevailing approach to dealing with old buildings, historic buildings, is there anything you can add to that in terms of the architectural aspects of layering on new aspects to a building or alternatively not mimicking of what is generally regarded as pastiche?

Yeah, I think be bold as the statement, to be honest. Bold but sensitive because we are dealing with buildings that are particularly of historic value. But it's interesting that very often the interventions that we reverse in buildings that have historic value come to now are the ones that have been made maybe in the last 40, 50 years and they're often the ones that are actually trying to mimic the past, the ones that, you know, pretend that, you know, that Victorian building always had a function or whatever it may be and try to disguise the interventions we made.

I think that's generally always a mistake. I think it's better to build something of its time and very often buildings we’re used to dealing with are the survivors of a period than probably most of our contemporaries have been demolished because they are amongst the best examples and the most robust examples of their time, and that's often the case because the original architects conceived them were built in their vision creating these buildings and I think we shouldn't shy away from involving our vision for them as well when you come to transform them. It's not to say that advocating a move back to the 1960s and seventies, where a more brutalist approach was taken, that, you know, began to ignore the cultural context of heritage buildings. 

That's an inappropriate to go down but I think the 1980s and certainly early nineties approach of trying to be so polite and deferential that actually you end up with that have horrible pastiche very often.

I think interventions want to be of their time, very much as the original buildings and I think that's the most successful expression at any age.

Speaking of our specific context here in Toronto, a lot of the sites that are deemed heritage are in intensely urban areas that are urbanizing at extremely high densities. And so what we end up with are two or three storey kind of Edwardian era or Victorian era buildings where they're deemed heritage and need to be retained on postage stamp size sites where the quote unquote highest and best use is a 50 or 60 storey residential or mixed use tower.

So there's really no way of successfully mimicking what's existing. And it is a very strong juxtaposition which is actually quite interesting and it creates this kind of composition of heritage buildings at the base that still inform the pedestrian experience, but very kind of sleek, high density towers above it that emerge and inform the skyline. So it's a really kind of interesting phenomenon that we're seeing, at least here locally.

Yeah. So that's interesting again, a different setting and a different set of drivers creating a particular solution. 

Well, thank you all. I think we're coming to the end of our time. Thank you for your insights Dev, Bruce and Mike. 

I'm off to look at some images of buildings you've described, and I'm sure those listening will want to as well.

So until next time, thanks very much indeed.