Old building or new building? Preserve historic buildings or create new ones? The numbers speak for themselves: the standard new building produces more climate-damaging CO2 than a refurbishment. With the topic of building in existing buildings, the Lübeck Construction Day on June 03, 2022 is – once again – at the cutting edge. Under the new direction of Michael Locher, Professor of Design and Building Construction at the TH Lübeck, top-class speakers will illuminate the topic with many practical examples from a theoretical and historical point of view. Architectural historians illuminate building in existing buildings from a theoretical and historical perspective.
A special focus is on dealing with traditions: How much creative and constructive constancy is necessary in building to preserve our collective, urban memory? In addition to climate change, it is above all the “scarcity of resources and immigration to cities that will make building in existing stock even more important in the future,” says Locher. “This increases the economic and social pressure on the existing buildings enormously. The question arises as to how profoundly we can intervene in the existing building in order to satisfy contemporary needs on the one hand and at the same time to preserve the familiar environment.”
Dieter Schnell, Professor at the University of Bern, speaks of “places as carriers of meaning”. “Every place in the experienced space has its meaning for the people.” With many examples he makes it clear: Thoughts become buildings, they give the space a temporal dimension. “Ruins are visible elapsed time” so Schnell. Practical aspects when renovating a house are the focus of the lecture by the architect Martin Klopfenstein. It’s about pollutants and humidity, buffer zones, sediments, contrasts. And about the difficulty of weighing up and deciding. “There isn’t one attitude towards building in existing buildings,” he emphasizes.
How do you implement a new event concept in Wittenberg Castle when you have to keep an eye on the tension between monument preservation and fire protection requirements? Architect José Gutiérrez Marquez reports on his experiences with many tongue-in-cheek anecdotes. The motto is: form no longer follows function, but “the form is already there, the function has to adapt,” says Marquez. You have to rethink every detail. Building in stock is very exciting, challenging, always new and very gratifying.
Building in existing stock is the perfect therapy for aging architects.
– Jose Gutierrez Marquez
Prof. Walter Angonese, Dean of Adademia di architettura, uses a 13-point plan in his work, which he goes through carefully and self-critically with every building project. His most important rule: intuition is the beginning, it must not be the result. The lecture by Prof. em. Hans Kohlhoff, ETH Zurich. With many examples, he makes it clear: architecture is not a question of problem solving, but of control.
The art is to combine different materials to create a monolithic whole that develops its own ornamental power.
– Prof. Walter Angonese
There will be intensive discussions at the concluding reception. José Gutiérrez Marquez sums up the conclusion:
Building in stock is like dancing the tango. There are figures, you suggest something, your partner accepts it or not, that results in a choreography that cannot be repeated identically a second time.