Adaptive use and reuse: a time-specific process

Reuse, in its different forms and meanings, is one of the crucial topics currently being explored from a cross-disciplinary perspective. This paper, considering the status of the speculation on the topic, introduces the concept of adaptive reuse as a time-specific strategy for keeping the building active, both from a material and immaterial point of view, mediating the relationship with the past and its different layered meanings. The conceptual framework is built around the idea that the built environment is always time-specific; it is planned and realised according to specific needs in a specific timeframe. In this perspective, every further adaptation is meant to keep the architecture updated to be suitable for the new timeframe: adaptive reuse is intended as a process that uses different tools and tactics to keep the buildings active. Reused buildings merge the values of the original construction and of subsequent adaptations. The evaluation of the adaptive reuse process relates to the capacity to add a new layer of sense to the existing significance and to the quality of reusability that the intervention achieves (Fig. 1)