The Adaptive Reuse of Neglected Buildings

Contested Spaces, Concerted Projects — we read in the book’s editorial statement — “collects the stories of some selected cases of contentious built heritage, in order to highlight the most innovative methodologies of re-activation” with the aim to explore the role of design practices in such a process. The idea of “re-activation” introduced by the editors implies a process of the reuse and re-valuing of something, be it a building, a site, a memory, an emotion or a behaviour, which has been inactive or dormant, but that can be brought to bear on a new situation. What happens when the item to be reused is too complicated to be reused? When it is too much entangled in its past, burdened by the awkward feelings and memories associated with it, which are recalled in and by its physical form? Too much embroiled in different and conflicting contemporary interpretations of those pasts and memories it catalyses? When all that makes it no longer possible to be left to neglect yet nor ready to be reprocessed and re-activated: which kind of reuse, if any, shall be pursued for such complex, built inheritances? In this chapter, I avail myself of the idea of adaptive reuse and I will refine it to consider how architectural interventions and other designed forms of reuse can contribute to a process of re-activation of this kind of disused buildings, which I am going to name “neglected buildings.” By presenting different possible approaches to the adaptive reuse of these buildings, I will explore what these interventions might do, at what extent they are determined by the nature of the building, which are their possible hindrances, and what possibilities they may rise