Architecture’s dark, dusty side is a shadow world in which buildings are demolished to make way for the new. An astonishing two-thirds of all waste in the UK is from the construction industry. And of the waste sent to landfill, 32 per cent is from this sector, according to a 2023 report. But there are signs the tide is turning. Thanks to innovative architects and smart policy initiatives, demolition — once the almost inevitable precursor to building in cities — is becoming unfashionable. Just last week, a campaign to save Bastion House and the former Museum of London, in the Barbican, from demolition has won the right to present its case to the High Court.
Keeping the carbon embodied in existing buildings is critical to sustain efforts to reach net zero by 2050. While Britain has a housing crisis, it also has Europe’s oldest housing stock. Redundant heritage buildings, from Victorian mills to old hospitals and shops, could accommodate up to 670,000 new homes, according to a recent report by Historic England. The mills of Yorkshire and Lancashire alone could supply 42,000.
Too much modern architecture is still premised on demolition, according to Will Hurst, managing editor of the Architects’ Journal, who last year co-founded the Don’t Waste Buildings group to campaign for reform of the construction industry around reuse. “There’s an idea that growth has to mean something new and shiny, and that to make that you need to demolish. [Reuse] needs to be seen as part of the circular economy. Landfill should be taxed more heavily,” he says.
Tileyard North in Wakefield by Hawkins/Brown 
Victoria Riverside in Leeds by Beckwith Design Associates
Consider what is lost with a demolition, he continues. Histories are inscribed in architecture and to erase buildings is to strip cities of a layer of their culture. Successful residential renovations — such as Victoria Riverside in Leeds (by Beckwith Design Associates) or Tileyard North at Rutland Mills in Wakefield (by Hawkins/Brown Architects) — impart an urban density and presence, ready-made pieces of city with a grain and texture and material quality that cannot be made now.
The UK’s housing economy remains reliant on the big housebuilders, with the 10 largest (by volume) producing about 40-50 per cent of all new homes. Reuse, with its complexities and contingencies, would facilitate a shift towards a more diversified market. “Retrofit is where the [small and medium-sized businesses] are [operating] and this trickle of work could turn into a flood if you only had the right incentives,” says Hurst.
It also presents creative opportunities. This May marked the 25th anniversary of the opening of Tate Modern, one of the defining moments in architectural reuse. “The Turbine Hall is something you could have never built from scratch,” Jacques Herzog, one of its architects, told me recently. “Reuse can open doors we wouldn’t have with a new building.” Without the success of Tate Modern there would arguably have been no revival of Battersea Power Station, a huge residential and retail reimagining.
Battersea Power Station; the success of Tate Modern arguably paved the way for its reimagining © High Level Photography Ltd
Battersea Sky Villa, part of the power station’s residential offering
Meanwhile, there is an opportunity today to create new homes from offices that would otherwise be demolished, according to Arno Brandlhuber of influential Berlin-based practice B+ architects. “Europe has many millions of square metres of empty offices. Since the pandemic the lines between work and home have shifted and the idea of zoning areas within a city now looks dated. If we can convert that space to homes, we will have mixed cities, much livelier and more interesting.”
If there is a frontline in the current battle against demolition it is Brussels. Faced with huge amounts of redundant industrial, infrastructural and office space, the city is pioneering ‘circular architecture’ — a term promoted by local practice Bouwmeester Maitre Architecte — prioritising renovation, adaptation and ensuring construction can accommodate other uses in the future.
Brussels World Trade Center. The 1970s buildings were radically reimagined by architects including 51N4E and Jaspers Eyers, and completed last year © Maxime Delvaux
The huge Brussels World Trade Center is a case in point. Completed last year, the banal 1970s buildings were radically reimagined by architects including 51N4E and Jaspers Eyers, partly for residential use. It was an experiment in urban mining, maximising the reuse of materials of the buildings formerly on site. To the south-east, the Royale Belge is a mixed-use building including workspace, apartments and a hotel in a reused 1960s corporate office HQ. Designed by British architects Caruso St John, working with others including Belgium’s Bovenbouw Architectuur, it was completed in 2023 to wide acclaim, winning the European Heritage category at last year’s Europa Nostra Awards.
Brussels is also home to Rotor, a practice that pioneered the salvage and reuse of architectural elements from demolitions and renovations, elements that not only still work perfectly well but add terrific character to contemporary buildings. A walk around its yard is a revelation, a slowly unfurling landscape of 1970s terrazzo and 1950s taps and basins, of op art murals and orange and brown tiles, of inventive ironmongery and solid office furniture.
Royale Belge, a mixed-use building to the south-east of Brussels, includes workspace, apartments and a hotel © Jonas Vandecasteele
It’s no coincidence that architect Marcel Raymaekers, the doyen of eccentric reuse, is Belgian. His strange, dreamlike buildings recombine seemingly disparate elements salvaged from demolished buildings, both historic and modern, to make strikingly eccentric new architectures.
Newly formed anti-demolition activist group HouseEurope! has also picked Brussels as its base. It is working to collect the million signatures required by the European Citizens’ Initiative to trigger new EU legislation limiting demolition and promoting reuse, such as by exempting renovation projects from VAT (in the UK, VAT charged on renovations but not on new buildings creates a particularly perverse disincentive).
“What we’re trying to achieve is a little like the right to repair [the 2024 EU directive to reduce waste and bolster the repair sector] — a right to reuse’,” its campaign manager, Alina Kolar, tells me. Brandlhuber, of B+, is among the founders; Herzog is a supporter. Although early in its journey, with around 41,000 signatures and counting, the group won the prestigious €100,000 Obel Award for architecture in June — “not [for] a building, but a movement and call to action,” the jury said.
Tour Bois-le-Prêtre, a 1970s slab block of social housing on the edge of paris, reimagined by Lacaton & Vassal © ADIS_T
France is taking up the fight against demolition too. When architects Lacaton & Vassal, whose slogan is “never demolish”, won the Pritzker Prize in 2021, it was a surprise to an establishment accustomed to self-consciously novel statement architecture. A 2017 Bordeaux project by the practice saved three 20th-century tower blocks, containing 530 flats, from demolition, at a cost of about €65,000 per unit — roughly half the price of replacing them, the practice estimates. “Demolition is a form of violence,” says Anne Lacaton.
We need to aim for the intelligent ruin
Lacaton estimates that 200,000 flats have been demolished in Paris over the last 20 years. That number would be a few hundred larger were it not for her work on Tour Bois-le-Prêtre in 2011. Alongside Frédéric Druot, Lacaton & Vassal saved a dull-looking 1970s slab block of social housing on the edge of Paris, expanding it with a translucent layer like a veil to create new terraces, balconies and winter gardens — hugely increasing the footprints of the apartments. As the construction work was all on the outside it could be done via scaffolding with the residents staying in their homes.
Antivilla by B+ has two studio spaces and one temporary living space, made in the bones of a former East German concrete lingerie factory © Erica Overmeer
Arguments that adaptive reuse might stymie architectural freedom are dispelled by the sameness of most contemporary urban redevelopment. If anything, the contrary is closer to the truth: adaptive reuse can lead to far more radical designs. Besides Tate Modern, consider the concrete towers that house B+. Part of a former concrete silo, the tall, extruded rectangular towers were christened ‘San Gimignano Lichtenberg’ by Brandlhuber, to echo the Italian city’s medieval skyscrapers — fortified dwellings illustrating power, wealth and status.
Brandlhuber’s Antivilla, with its two studio spaces and one temporary living space, was made in the bones of a former East German concrete lingerie factory, its windows roughly drilled out and expanded, emphasising its status as a found object. “We need to aim for the intelligent ruin,” he tells me. “All architecture becomes a ruin but we need to design things so that they can be easily reused. Working with existing buildings should be the norm.”
House M by Xstudio, which transformed an abandoned corner store, in Las Palmas, Gran Canaria, into live/work space © David Rodriguez Benitez
Also at smaller scale is House M, in Las Palmas, Gran Canaria, an abandoned corner store repurposed into live/work space that celebrates its former redundancy. Ground floor windows remain blocked up and the concrete upper floor is as rough and ready as the badly laid breeze blocks below. It is witty and urbane and itself a comment on the nature of reuse and adaptation.
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European architecture is peppered with alternatives to demolition that enrich and inspire. Reuse may not yet be the norm. But if we are more exposed to the benefits, argue its advocates, to the value of urban memory and the sheer mad waste of crunching up all that debris, we might begin to see the potential and the beauty in what already exists.
Edwin Heathcote is the FT’s architecture and design critic
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