Resilience and Adaptability

Design interventions for the reuse of existing structures must face the question of the past and the extent to which it should be included in the design for the future. This is the point of departure of Int | AR, a yearly publication on current issues in international adaptive reuse.The 21st century has witnessed a climate of crisis, most often immediate and unpredictable but, at times, foreseen, impending and even expected. Such events and the ability for continuity, recovery and change, require strength borne from adaptability. This volume explores the idea of resilience, from anticipatory strategies to shock absorption, from the reduction of material needs to the widening of the array of resources, from the liberation of traditional constraints to new forms of collaborations, from built-in redundancies to risk mitigation. The examples range from places of resilience in post-industrial cities and in the suburbs of Paris to the rebuilding of post-war Beirut and different resilient approaches to Italy’s and Japan’s earthquake experience. Linking the theoretical concept of resilience to the planning practice of adaptive reuse, the volume demonstrates the interdisciplinary usefulness of this concept in the design disciplines.