Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

In a time of climate crisis and housing shortages, a bold, visionary call to replace current wasteful construction practices with an architecture of reuse

As climate change has escalated into a crisis, the reuse of existing structures is the only way to even begin to preserve our wood, sand, silicon, and iron, let alone stop belching carbon monoxide into the air. Our housing crisis means that we need usable buildings now more than ever, but architect and critic Aaron Betsky shows that new construction-often seeking to maximize profits rather than resources, often soulless in its feel-is not the answer. Whenever possible, it is better to repair, recycle, renovate, and reuse-not only from an environmental perspective, but culturally and artistically as well.

Architectural reuse is as old as civilization itself. In the streets of Europe, you can find fragments from the Roman Empire. More recently, marginalized communities from New York to Detroit-queer people looking for places to gather or cruise, punks looking to make loud music, artists and displaced people looking for space to work and live-have taken over industrial spaces created then abandoned by capitalism, forging a unique style in the process. Their methods-from urban mining to dumpster diving-now inform architects transforming old structures today.

Betsky shows us contemporary imaginative reuse throughout the world: the Mexican housing authority transforming concrete slums into well-serviced apartments; the MassMOCA museum, built out of old textile mills; the squatted city of Christiana in Copenhagen, fashioned from an old army base; Project Heidelberg in Detroit. All point towards a new circular economy of reuse, built from the ashes of the capitalist economy of consumption.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Introduction The Principles of Imaginative Reuse (1)
• Part I Foundations
• Chapter 1 The Architecture of Remains: A Short History of Reuse (23)
• Chapter 2 Dumpster Diving and Urban Mining: The Materials of Modern Reuse (40)
• Part 2 Traditions
• Chapter 3 Ephemeral Architecture (59)
• Chapter 4 Ghost Architecture: Building from Accumulations of the Past (72)
• Chapter 5 Squatting, Installing, and Activating (85)
• Part 3 Uses
• Chapter 6 Housing: Re-inhabitation (105)
• Chapter 7 An Architecture of Doing Nothing (119)
• Chapter 8 Reusing the Landscape (134)
• Chapter 9 The World of Imaginative Reuse: Clubs, Community Spaces, Markets, Shops (152)
• Chapter 10 The Monuments of Imaginative Reuse (Built from the Monuments of Industry) (167)
• Part 4 Beyond Buildings
• Chapter 11 Faking It: Constructed Situations (185)
• Conclusion (201)
• Acknowledgments (205)
• A Note on Sources (206)
• Notes (210)
• Index (214)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

"We should not construct new buildings from scratch," argues architecture critic Betsky (Monster Leviathan) in this eye-opening treatise in favor of "adaptive reuse," an emerging school of thought which holds that remodeling existing buildings instead of tearing them down is the best way to lower the emissions of new construction. That's because a building is a "carbon sink" that, much like a tree being cut down, releases carbon into the atmosphere when it is demolished; in fact, Betsky writes, tearing down an old building to build a "net zero" one still releases more carbon than simply having retrofitted the old building to be more energy efficient. As a longtime advocate for architecture as an art form, Betsky takes on the task of showing how this new approach (which is already becoming de rigueur in Europe) isn't a death knell for the profession but an opportunity: "The Zen-like act of doing nothing leads to particular strategies. The first of these is to see imaginative reuse as, above all else, a form of revelation--a kind of archaeology.... Our work consists primarily of revealing what is already there." Insights abound as Betsky delves into examples--which include not only remodeling but also disassembling old structures and reusing their constitutive parts in new projects, and touch on everything from traditional Japanese woodworking to tents designed for Coachella. Readers will be captivated by Betsky's hopefulness. (Nov.)

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Aaron Betsky is a critic of art, architecture, and design and the author of over twenty books on those subjects. He writes a twice-weekly blog, Beyond Buildings , for Architect Magazine . Trained as an architect and in the humanities at Yale, Mr. Betsky has served as the Director of the Cincinnati Art Museum and the Netherlands Architecture Institute, as well as Curator of Architecture and Design at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.