by Helene Holland*
Since the 1960s, much of Europe and North America has seen a large process of deindustrialization. More than a hundred years after the Industrial Revolution, many factories and other manufacturing sites have been abandoned and their futures were left in question (Berger & High, 2019). In the 1970s, this large swath of abandoned industrial sites came at the same time as UNESCO’s adoption of The Operational Guidelines for the Implementation of the World Heritage Convention. Not only would environmental sustainability soon become a pressing issue, especially in urban areas, but the convention also raised concerns about preserving cultural heritage. It reaffirmed that protecting areas of heritage such as architecture made a large contribution to goals of sustainable development (UNESCO, 2021). This new direction for urban practices had a major impact on the industrial sites that were recently rendered useless. Rising environmental movements and energy costs also raised concerns about the resources utilized in demolish and construction of new buildings. Later coined “adaptive reuse,” a new architectural practice of reusing old structures was a fitting solution for these issues of cultural heritage and environmental impact. [Read more…] about Adaptive re-use at Berlin’s KulturBrauerei