Transform: Promising Places, Second Chances, and the Architecture of Transformational Change

'Beautifully presented and accompanied by abundant photographs and plan diagrams, the entry masterfully explores Berke’s modernist inclinations, her minimalist style, and her firm’s savvy handling of spaces and materials. Architectural students and practitioners will find much to appreciate.' - Publishers WeeklyTenBerke publishes Transform with Monacelli, an argument for the regenerative reuse of old buildings.?Adaptive Reuse is how architecture helps us grow into a changing world. It combines the best of old and new—through renovation, restoration, regeneration, reimagination, and repair. A practice of sensitive stewardship and creative conservation, it is what turns the obsolete into the germane. With TenBerke’s most recent publication with Monacelli, Transform: Promising Places, Second Chances, and the Architecture of Transformational Change, the studio shows that creatively and visibly repurposed places are also where people feel especially empowered to make new beginnings in their own lives.Transform illustrates how TenBerke, in all its transformative designs, reveals the signs and signatures of adaptation, composes a continuity in which the after doesn’t erase the before, and designs places where people are able to leave new traces—and make their mark. The adaptive reuse in Transform goes beyond the usual before and after of renovation and conversion, into the long and lively places of buildings, which are always being remade by the people who use them.Transform includes Against Historic Preservation, an argument for the creative reuse of old buildings by Deborah Berke, founder of TenBerke and dean of the Yale School of Architecture; along with Promise, a critical narrative essay by award-winning design writer Thomas de Monchaux. It also includes The Environmental Case for Adapting Buildings at Scale, a report by urban scientist Karen C. Seto who looks to building reuse as a means to manage the untenable rate of urbanization of our natural environments. Transform includes, in the words of artist Titus Kaphar, “Time Is That Collaborator. . .” a conversation between himself and Berke inspired by TenBerke’s design for NXTHVN, a community arts center that he founded in New Haven Connecticut, bringing former industrial buildings to new life. With editorial and creative direction from TenBerke Senior Principal Arthi Krishnamoorthy, Transform presents accessible and actionable case studies of adaptive reuse projects, revealing the thinking that guides each one: from NXTHVN, where an arts incubator and community center was born out of disused factories; to the Yale School of Art, where an old swimming pool became a gallery and classroom; to the pioneering 122 Community Arts Center in downtown Manhattan, where an old public school became a new performance space and civic crossroads, to the 21c hotel in Oklahoma City, where one of the Ford Motor Company’s first assembly plants became a hotel and event space, catalyzing the revitalization of a new livable neighborhood.In Transform, we see that the architecture of adaptation offers a new approach to old places that is at once sensitive and bold, at once conscious of histories and legacies, yet optimistically forward-looking to new possibilities. This is the architecture of second chances, of promising places, and of transformational change.
A guide to contemporary architecture practice in one of the most important fields today - the transformative adaptation of existing buildings. A manifesto and survey of contemporary practice by one of the leading offices in this domain, TenBerke
A guide to contemporary architecture practice in one of the most important fields today—the transformative adaptation of existing buildings. A manifesto and survey of contemporary practice by one of the leading offices in this domain, Deborah Berke Partners.For over 30 years, Deborah Berke Partners has been a leader in transforming old buildings for new futures. Transform: The Architecture of Adaptation will explore and document the ecological and urban imperative to revive and adapt existing built fabric, and it will demonstrate innovative and timeless tools and methods for creating successful new architecture out of old structures and found conditions. The book will be illustrated primarily, but not exclusively, with projects by Deborah Berke Partners, including academic buildings, boutique hotels, and community and cultural centers. Essays by Deborah Berke, Noah Biklen, Arthi Krishnamoorthy, and Alan Brake introduce each chapter. It will also include contributions by critics, planners, and artists with a shared interest in creating a sustainable, equitable, and enriching urban environment. Contributors include artist Titus Kaphar, urban history scholar Karen Seto, environmenal design leaders Atelier Ten, and photographer Christopher Payne. The term “adaptive reuse” is bland and imprecise. It implies a lack of rigor, as if old buildings were discarded objects that can easily be repurposed, like a turning an old milk crate into a bookshelf. Buildings—good ones, bad ones, whether designed by a famous architect, or without an author—are complex things, with histories, with impacts on their surroundings, with relations to people and places. They do not all deserve to be saved, but many do. Sometimes an unremarkable building can be transformed into something better than it ever was. Even good buildings by noted architects can be improved upon, especially if their use has changed or if their context has been significantly altered. In much of the country, particularly small to mid-sized, post-industrial cities, opportunities abound for the creative reuse of existing buildings. Deborah Berke Partners approaches these buildings—old warehouses, office buildings, even a historic sanatorium designed by H. H. Richardson—as material resources and as the foundation of sustainable urban redevelopment. These projects have impacts that extend far beyond their walls—this work is part of an urgent rethinking of American urbanism.