Beyond Materiality Adaptive Reuse as a Situated and Ethical Practice in the Global South

Care as Design Strategy Adaptive Reuse as a Curatorial Practice

In the current contemporary polycrisis context, marked by urgent ecological, social, and political issues, the adaptive reuse of the built heritage emerges as a central architectural practice in the transition toward more sustainable and responsible relationships with urban environments. This contribution proposes a reflection on the interpretation of reuse as a form of care: a design paradigm that entails a complex approach to the existing, not solely technical or conservative, but also critical, interpretative, and forward-looking. Care, understood in a sense close to curatorship, involves an act of listening and the recognition of the latent qualities of the existing, oriented toward a future vision. From this perspective, the unused or transitional built heritage within urban contexts is interpreted as a “value-laden complex”: a cultural and social infrastructure, layered in its material, spatial, symbolic, and functional meanings, which is activated only through a projective gaze capable of listening and rewriting. This leads to a redefinition of heritage value—not based on formal or monumental integrity, but on its potential for activation, on its incomplete, open, and adaptable nature. In this sense, Adaptive reuse design strategies are thus a meaning-making device, a space of negotiation between permanence and transformation, between matter and memory, and a fertile ground for design creativity. This theoretical framework is articulated through the analysis of exemplary case studies, such as Sala Beckett by Flores & Prats and Atelier Kempe Thill interventions on Wintercircus in Ghent, in which architectural design engages with the existing as a living matter to be critically re-read. Adaptive reuse thus emerges as a strategic design tool to responsibly address some of the challenges of the contemporary city, contributing to a renewed relationship between project and heritage, between past and future.

Innovation in Design for Sustainability

The intensification of ecological crises, resource scarcity, and social inequalities compels design to fundamentally redefine its role, methods, and criteria for innovation. This article argues that innovation in design can no longer be understood as the mere creation of new artifacts, but rather as the capacity to reconfigure systems of production, consumption, and disposal. Based on the widely recognized premise that the majority of the environmental impacts of products and services are determined during the design phase, the designer is repositioned as a strategic agent in the transition toward sustainable socio-economic models.Within this context, the article examines the synergistic articulation of four complementary approaches: Ecodesign, as an analytical foundation oriented toward life-cycle thinking; Circular Design, focused on redefining business models and material flows; Biodesign, which incorporates biological principles and processes; and Human-Centered Design (HCD), responsible for ensuring social, cultural, and ethical relevance. It is argued that the transdisciplinary integration of these approaches constitutes an emerging paradigm of systemic innovation in design, in which success is assessed according to interdependent environmental, social, and economic criteria, thereby demanding new professional competencies and expanded forms of collaboration.

Beyond Taxonomy: Adaptive Reuse Phenomenographies Design Driven Research on the Reanimation of Post-Communist Industrial Ruins

This research examines adaptive reuse within the contested terrain of post-communist industrial ruins in Romania, where heritage discourses have long overlooked production and labour-related architecture. Drawing on phenomenographic methodologies and situated design practices, the work proposes a critical and creative engagement with derelict industrial sites, reframing them not as static relics but as heterotopias—spaces of deviation imbued with complex social, political, and spatial entanglements. In response to cultural amnesia and speculative real estate pressures, the study advocates “protection through transformation,” in which adaptive reuse serves as a mode of cultural resistance and collective memory preservation. The approach diverges from conventional documentation or musealisation strategies by employing hybrid visual tools—hand drawings, video vignettes, and spatial interventions—that embrace the ambiguity and “dirty concepts” inherent in these fragile contexts. Two primary self-authored case studies, set in the Transylvanian city of Sibiu, serve as design laboratories, revealing how architectural acts of drawing, walking, and filming can produce epistemic artefacts and catalyse community re-engagement. Rather than seeking formal completion, these interventions operate within temporal and spatial voids, generating multi-scalar responses that resist reductive binaries such as old/new or use/disuse. The research contributes a methodology that positions adaptive reuse as an iterative, phenomenographic process, one that transcends taxonomic representation and disrupts prevailing preservationist narratives, while remaining deeply attentive to site specificity, historical trauma, and the evolving materialities of ruin. By merging design, history, and critical theory, this work expands the possibilities of architectural reuse, not as nostalgic reclamation or typological analysis, but as a form of spatial justice that enables sustainable transformation of existing sites and buildings endangered by predatory and invasive building practices.

Extinction as Crisis: design between technocratic modernity and the regeneration of situated knowledges

This article proposes a theoretical reflection on the crisis of extinction as a multidimensional process that transcends the disappearance of biological species, manifesting also in the sociocultural sphere through the erosion of knowledges, artisanal practices, and situated ways of life. The objective is to understand the ambivalent role of design, historically aligned with capitalist and technocratic logic that accelerates these extinction processes, but also potentially capable of acting as an agent of regeneration when adopting participatory and situated approaches. Based on a non-systematic literature review, the article articulates discussions on the concept of extinction, the critique of modernity, the Anthropocene, and situated knowledges, proposing an original reading that connects these debates to the field of design. It is argued that although the extinction of certain practices seems inexorable in the face of hegemonic global forces, participatory and regenerative design strategies can open pathways for the re-signification and strengthening of threatened cultures. The conclusion points to the need for design to abandon its technocratic and centralizing posture, repositioning itself as a mediator of intercultural dialogues and co-creator of possible futures anchored in local knowledges. 

Adaptive Reuse as Situated Critical Practice Torö and Handelsresanden

This paper examines adaptive reuse as a critical and situated architectural practice through two case studies — Torö and Handelsresanden — developed by Atelier–Heyman Hamilton in Stockholm. Both projects intervene in typhus, a typology of standardized prefabricated single-family dwellings produced during Sweden’s welfare era (1930s–1970s). These dwellings, emblematic of the egnahem movement — a state initiative to provide land and low-cost loans to sober, working men — entangle vernacular details, industrial production, domestic ideals and the moral ambitions of the welfare state. By engaging with the material, spatial, and ideological legacies of typhus, the case studies show how adaptive reuse can reorient the normative spatial and social alignments inscribed in everyday domestic architecture. The interventions are situated within a theoretical framework expanding on discourses of alteration (Scott 2008) and cultural memory (Stone 2019). It draws specifically from Suha Hasan’s analysis of “aesthetic regimes”, Sara Ahmed’s concept of “orientation”, Jane Rendell’s articulation of “insertion as montage”, and Donna Haraway’s notion of “situated knowledges”. These perspectives frame the design process as a form of critical inquiry, one that engages questions of identity, orientation, and embodied experience. Through detailed readings of the case studies, the paper shows how precise programmatic, structural, and material interventions operate as critical tools, engaging the social norms encoded in the existing homes while reconfiguring domestic space toward alternative ways of living. Taken together, Torö and Handelsresanden raise a broader question: how can situated, context-sensitive practices of adaptive reuse reposition standardized housing as a site for critical reflection on the social and political implications — historical and contemporary — of the planning of the egnahem movement and the design of typhus? By addressing typhus not as static artifacts but as active sites of negotiation, the paper argues that adaptive reuse can be a practice of both architectural and cultural critique.

MEANING AND INFRASTRUCTURES OF AGENCY IN CONTEMPORARY FASHION THE CASE OF A SEWING MACHINE OF ONE’S OWN