Retrofitting Old Buildings for New Use
Tuesday, March 27th, 2012
The New York Times discusses retrofitting old buildings for new use in Paris. With 80 percent of buildings in the US built in the last fifty years, is this the wave of the future? In Paris, a converted 50-year-old cement block tower is successfully remade into a sparkling new building.
| "This half-century-old tower used to be one of those blocks. Its makeover, by a creative team of local architects — Frédéric Druot, Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal — is a case study in architectural ingenuity and civic rejuvenation. It’s a challenge to urban innovators too. Instead of replacing the old tower with an entirely new building, the designers saw what was worthwhile about the existing architecture and added to it." |
Marc Angélil and Cary Siress explore this topic at greater length in their article for the spring/summer 2012 issue of the Journal, called "The Paris Banlieue: Peripheries of Inequality."