Many old buildings can be reused and repurposed today rather than demolished, leading to huge savings on money and time, along with reduced dust pollution.
Indraneel Dutta, Principal Architect, Dutta Kannan Associates
Our cities are getting more and more dense. A lot of existing buildings which still have not reached their full life cycle of say 25-40 years are prime candidates for adaptive reuse. Many clients buy buildings which are 10-15 years old and want to demolish them and build new. There is a huge potential for reuse of existing materials.
At our firm, we use locally available stone, sand, steel, and cement that are manufactured within a 300-km radius. For our upcoming project for Methods India, we are aiming for a gold rating by LEED.
We supervise and monitor every bit of materials being used. For instance, during tile laying, cutting, conducting, wiring, painting etc, all are closely monitored to the last decimal so that there is no wastage and the quantities re sufficient. This creates huge savings for our builder clients.
For a project involving a 20-year old building with ground and two floors, we realised that the time taken to demolish it, get plan approvals, and then build a new one and design its interiors, would take at least 18 months. So we decided to go for adaptive reuse. We retained the ground and the two floors and created large openings using steel strengthening and added an extra floor with ISMB and deck slabs.
We reclad the exterior facade with Alston’s Zinc panels and engineered kayukov wood louvres, which cut the harsh sunlight and heat as the site was facing west. The aperture of the louvres was adjusted to take in the exterior views. We completed the project in 120 days! By not rebuilding the floors, we saved a lot of money on cement, steel, sand, water, and electricity, and the environment from pollution.
