The silent brief part I.
The care for historic buildings is an important task in looking after the heritage of our communities. Historic buildings tell the stories of past eras, of intricate craftsmanship and artistic expression, of the social values of the time and how buildings of today have since evolved. At daab design, we revive small, large, simple and prestigious buildings using conservation, sustainability and community as our North star.
No matter their scale, context or history, I love that buildings have a large part of the project brief hidden in their fabric. I listen to their condition, their details and their past lives; I call it the silent brief. The ability to retrieve and address the silent brief requires careful observation, intuition and tapping into layered past experience. Conservation work has always included improving a buildings’ fabric to make it suitable for new occupants and extend its life. Today, energy performance holds equal weight with maintaining structural integrity or transmitting cultural heritage.
It is abundantly clear that a building’s fabric should operate better environmentally, but how do we avoid this being at the expense of sacrificing original heritage integrity? This ongoing debate is not an easy tension to resolve. I feel that as Architects we should be looking away from extreme positions and tap into our best asset – our creativity. How can we think creatively to balance preservation with improvement? How can we balance the client brief with the silent brief?
Buildings consist of a delicate ecosystem of elements that perform together. When upgrading the fabric performance through retrofitting a traditional building, the decisions of whether to retain, change or modify the way the ecosystem performs must be carefully considered. Incorporating materials into that ecosystem has to be considered in a careful and holistic way. It can be very complicated to incorporate non-traditional materials into that ecosystem. Instead, an upgraded traditional material could enhance performance without disturbing the system itself. For example, a cork and lime plaster can improve performance while retaining the breathable properties of the original masonry. This approach however involves testing new technical solutions involving traditional materials and crafts in a new way rather than relying on ready-made solutions which are often suitable to the new-build sector but are not always well adapted to traditional buildings.
Services retrofitting is another aspect that requires thinking outside the box. The ever growing quantity of services required is not easy to insert in a listed building. You can minimise the amount of some superfluous services such as audio visual, but it is not possible to compromise on ventilation routes (which keeps your building away from its worst enemy – condensation), or hot water pipes to and from a heat pump, and many others.
In one such scenario, I boldly took the services out of the building altogether where they unavoidably clashed with original fabric and features, and relocated them to an amalgamated riser on the rear façade.
We must use our creativity as a positive driving force to arrive at design that protects, enhances and improves. This approach allows us to step away from the mindset of throwing away what we consider to no longer function to ask how we can salvage and retain in line with modern standards by asking questions rather than making assumptions.
I developed the design for secondary glazing, an item that is a rare find on the market. Instead of trying to make it disappear I approached their design in a non-apologetic way using solid timber and well performing double glazing. Embracing our love for natural materials and how things are made, I involved joiners early to develop fitting systems that are non-intrusive or reversible for future users.
I have always approached conservation with the same consideration for reversibility and adaptability. This proves a robust answer to numerous conservation challenges including change of use, change of owner requirements, and of course, future-proofs the changes that will be required that we don’t know about yet.
Architectural conservation and retrofitting requires us to listen and be creative; we must listen to what the buildings’ history, architecture, materials and condition tells us, and we must adapt buildings for generations to come while understanding their delicate ecosystems. After all, the most sustainable building is the one we already have, so caring for and conserving historic structures with a positive and open mindset maintains both the rich social fabric and history of our places and planet.
Anaïs Bléhaut, Director, daab design