Adapt! Designing New Lives for Old Buildings (Book Review)
- James Lesh
- Jun 10
- 5 min read
Adapt! Designing New Lives for Old Buildings, by Hannah Lewi and Cameron Logan, Melbourne, Uro Publications, 2025, 200 pp., colour illus., $85.00 AUD (hardback), ISBN 978-1-922601-37-7.
In our current moment of urban anxiety—marked by vacant office towers, a housing crisis, and carbon target deadlines—the demolition of existing buildings feels increasingly indefensible. Yet, the path to saving them is rarely straightforward. It is obstructed by a tangle of building codes, risk-averse decision-makers, and, paradoxically, a heritage protection system that seemingly loves buildings to death.
Entering this complex terrain is Adapt! Designing New Lives for Old Buildings, a visually commanding and intellectually rigorous volume by architectural historians Hannah Lewi and Cameron Logan. Published by Uro Publications, the book arrives at a timely juncture, landing amidst a surging global literature that is rapidly defining adaptive reuse as a distinct discipline. Scholars like Liliane Wong (Adaptive Reuse: Extending the Lives of Buildings) and Sally Stone (UnDoing Buildings) are elevating the topic within architectural and heritage discourse.
From Recycling to Creative Editing
Adapt! anchors this literature firmly in Australian soil, offering a localised yet globally resonant argument: that the most innovative architecture of the twenty-first century will not necessarily be found in the creation of the new, but in the creative editing of what already exists. The exclamation in its title riffs on Lacaton and Vassal's manifesto Never Demolish! and Climax Change! How Architecture Must Transform in the Age of Ecological Emergency by Pedro Gadanho. Adapt! has a sense of urgency from the front cover onwards.
For Australian architectural historians, Adapt! reads as the spiritual successor to the seminal 1982 text New Uses for Old Buildings in Australia by journalist Anne Latreille, architect Peter Latreille, and builder Peter Lovell. That canonical volume documented the first wave of Australian "building recycling," a movement that gave us the festival marketplaces and warehouse apartments of the 1980s. But where that era often leaned into the pastiche of recreated yesterdays, Lewi and Logan showcase a practice that has matured into something far more sophisticated. This is not conservation for conservation's sake; it is adaptive reuse as a distinct mode of city-making, where heritage, design, and conservation intermingle.
The Architecture of "Republishing"
The book is anchored by the "ADAPT" research project, supported by the Alastair Swayn Foundation, and grounded in rigorous interviews with leading architects. Through these conversations, a third way emerges—a path between the clean slate of demolition and the museum-like stasis too often codified in planning policy. Architects describe their work not as conservation, but as "republishing". Michael Patroni of Spaceagency articulates this shift well: a building can be "re-edited" to engage a new generation while honouring its "former lives" through deep research and sensitive intervention.
This approach requires a specific kind of detective work. The Melbourne-based practice NMBW, for instance, reports searching for "latent conditions" within the "grey ghosts" of the RMIT Melbourne city campus. By locating original structural voids and former truck entries, they were able to unlock new circulation routes through the university's concrete monoliths. It is a strategy of "informed removal"—stripping back the "junk" of accumulated renovations to find the path of least resistance.
Navigating Heritage Friction
However, Adapt! does not shy away from the friction inherent in this kind of architecture. The essays openly grapple with the "unproductive gap" between heritage doctrine and architectural reality. The Burra Charter's famous heritage dictum—to "change as much as necessary but as little as possible"—appears as ethically sound but practically stifling. To make a redundant building viable for modern life, architects often need to be bolder than tradition suggests.
Kerstin Thompson Architects' work on the Broadmeadows Town Hall is a case in point. Rather than treating the monolithic 1960s brick structure as a sacred object, the architects undertook a "vigilant restoration" that involved a violent but necessary act: slicing into the northern face to create a new, transparent entry. This cut did not diminish heritage significance; it activated it, allowing the building to transition from a redundant structure into a piece of living social infrastructure. It illustrates a shift from valuing heritage solely as a regime—statutory lists and rigid protections—to valuing it as an everyday texture that supports community intimacy. It helped that Broadmeadows Town Hall had no statutory heritage listing.
Environmental Imperatives and Research Provocation
The imperative for such work is increasingly environmental. Academic Robert Crawford's contribution on sustainability and construction provides the hard scientific backing to Carl Elefante's dictum that "the greenest building is the one that is already built". Yet, the interviews reveal the technical headaches behind the science. Meeting modern thermal performance and accessibility standards in a nineteenth-century wool store or a brutalist library is a struggle against policies, codes, and standards designed for new builds. The architects speak of the fight for "unconditioned spaces"—areas that do not need to be hermetically sealed—to save both the building's character and its carbon footprint.
It is here, however, that the reader may sense that adaptive reuse remains an unfinished area of research. While the introductory essays cast a wide and multi-disciplinary net—expertly weaving together heritage policy, structural engineering, and urban history—the study then returns to the familiar territory of architectural discourse. Put differently, the opening essays promise an analysis of the collaborative friction between engineers, policymakers, and designers—the teams and frameworks producing adaptive reuse—but the documented projects rely on the architect's voice. This disconnect suggests that while Adapt! is a foundational text, it is also a provocation. The field of adaptive reuse is still evolving, and its complex reality requires broader, multidisciplinary research support to move its discourse beyond individual projects. In parallel, applied research can also use this book as a base to explore how the design, heritage, planning, and real estate sectors can better align to support strong adaptive reuse outcomes.
A Snapshot of the Early Twenty-First Century
Overall, the selection of twenty-three case studies—grouped into Education, Community-Making, Urbanity, Interiority, and Landscape—offers a revealing snapshot of the field in the early twenty-first century. Each is lushly illustrated with photographs and many original drawings. The focus is overwhelmingly metropolitan, situated in the dense, heritage-rich inner rings of Melbourne and Sydney. Reflecting Lewi and Logan's respective home bases, this geographic lean is best seen in the transformations of Collingwood Yards and the Walsh Bay Arts Precinct.
However, the editors have ensured the inclusion of regional narratives. Projects like the Premier Mill Hotel in Katanning, Western Australia, and the Spring Bay Mill in Tasmania demonstrate that adaptive reuse is not just a metropolitan luxury. In regional towns, repurposing a flour mill or a woodchip factory can be an essential act of economic and cultural survival. Ultimately, Adapt! frames the architect not as an author of the new, but as a custodian of the existing. It suggests that the "grain and texture" of our cities—the elusive quality of authenticity that cannot be designed from scratch—relies on our willingness to work with the "mongrel" buildings we have inherited. As our cities densify and the climate crisis deepens, this capacity to edit, adapt, and republish our built environment may well become the most essential skill of the age—the future of both architecture and conservation.
At Heritage Workshop, we specialise in the strategic pragmatism required to navigate the complexities of adaptive reuse and next-generation conservation. To discuss how we can help unlock the value of your project through expert heritage planning, policy, and research, please contact Dr James Lesh and the team at Heritage Workshop.
This article is adapted from Dr James Lesh's book review originally published in Fabrications: The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand. Access the full review online (DOI: 10.1080/10331867.2026.2658987).
