Recycled Buildings: Challenging Sustainability in an Era of Air Conditioning

It is now often said that the greenest building is one that is already built. But as we approach the question of re-using buildings very different issues and challenges come up when compared to other discussions about recycling. In contrast to the recycling of consumer goods, the built environment involves questions of planning, urban development, legislation and an unclear disaggregation of who are the customers, producers and end users. As such then there are very different ideas of responsibility involved. The majority of recycling debates typically focus on the present or recent past, but in buildings we are faced with the ideas, visions, politics and failures of previous years, decades or centuries. To ask the question about recycling buildings is thus a consideration of the possibilities and limitations of recycling the past, in all its material, concrete, earthy and immovable forms. As we will see, the recycling of buildings is increasingly featured in discussions about sustainability and the reduction of energy consumption, with the re-use of existing structures having very real benefits over newly constructed ‘eco ’ or ‘green ’ architecture. This is particularly applicable in the face of an epidemic of architectural design now spreadin