Near the end of a building's lifecycle, many times when the building is no longer deemed useful, decisions are made whether to wait out a new tenant for the structure or to destroy it to make way for new construction. If the latter, while the building waits, its materials are left to the elements to decay away through natural weathering over time. To give these environments new life would not only reinvigorate the surrounding area with a renewed purpose, but is also a much more sustainable process of construction than simply demolishing and creating whole new structures.
To be able to capitalize on the structure, material, and identifying characteristics of an existing building is the goal of a well performed adaptive re-use project. This project outlines steps and the process in which an architect should complete as they go through the phases of construction for this process. The steps that I developed to complete this process are Observation, Preservation, Renovation, and Activation. Through the completion of this process a respectful interchange of ideas, character, and structure is shared between the old and new.
The host of this process of adaptive re-use is a Catholic school located in Pittsburgh PA, originally built in 1875. Over its long history it has seen many changes and additions to its original construction but has since been abandoned for over ten years. This thesis takes this building and explains the process of re use for taking this abandoned Catholic school and creating an artist residency and community complex. / Master of Architecture / As the defining edge of human expansion raises our population to a critical point, to house and provide for this continuous growth requires the construction of spaces to grow with it at a comparable rate. As newer spaces get created, older spaces become emptied to hopefully be filled by another entity. Brand new buildings, as exciting as the notion can be, will continuously become less prevalent in the world of architectural design as our method of conservation and architectural preservation gets better to match this rise in density.
This thesis outlines the process one should complete when renovating or adding onto an existing structure. The host of this study is a catholic school from 1875 that is being adapted and re-used to become an artist residency and cultural art space.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VTETD/oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/110855 |
| Date | 21 June 2022 |
| Creators | McKnight, Julian Ethan |
| Contributors | Architecture, Piedmont-Palladino, Susan C., Feuerstein, Marcia F., VanderPoel, Peter Frederick |
| Publisher | Virginia Tech |
| Source Sets | Virginia Tech Theses and Dissertation |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | ETD, application/pdf |
| Rights | In Copyright, http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ |
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