The Urban Room: Rethinking Adaptive Reuse After Demolition
Image by Frazer Macdonald Hay There is an uncomfortable question that architects rarely ask. What happens when the building we hoped to conserve has already disappeared? Adaptive reuse has become one of the defining architectural ideas of our age. Around the world, former factories become museums, warehouses become homes, churches become theatres, and industrial landscapes become parks. These projects are celebrated because they offer an alternative to demolition. They remi
Whose Heritage Is It, Anyway?
( French / Arabic ) When we talk about heritage, whose heritage are we really talking about? It’s a question that has stayed with me over the years of working in this field. Not as an abstract provocation, but as something that emerges repeatedly in practice, in projects, in conversations, and in the spaces between intention and reality. Heritage is often presented as an unquestionable good: something to be protected, celebrated, and passed on. And in many ways, it is. But
Buildings, Memory, and Mediation
Exploring peacebuilding as a lens for adaptive reuse I have been thinking about the relationship between peacebuilding and adaptive reuse. At first, the connection may not seem obvious. One operates in the aftermath of conflict, working with fractured societies, contested narratives, and fragile relationships. The other is often understood as a technical or architectural process, adapting existing buildings for new use. But the more I work across both, the less separate they
What Buildings Know & Why It Matters Now
I have recently completed a manuscript exploring adaptive reuse, not simply as an architectural method, but as a way of thinking about how we live, remember, and change. At its core, the book asks a simple question: What happens if we stop treating buildings as objects to be replaced, and start understanding them as things to be read? Over time, that question became something else entirely. It became clear that adaptive reuse is not only about buildings. It is about how we re
Fractals of Violence: Why War Feels Uncomfortably Familiar
We like to believe that war happens elsewhere. In distant countries. Between governments and armies. Among people unlike ourselves, driven by forces we do not share. It is something we watch, analyse, condemn, but ultimately hold at a distance. This distance is comforting. It allows war to remain exceptional. It preserves the idea that violence, at scale, belongs to another realm entirely. But what if that distance is thinner than we think? The current war with Iran, like the
