Tour Bois-le-Prêtre: transformation of a housing block (2012)

designofhomes.co.uk

Note this is in a fancy neighborhood. I wish all 60/70s projects to be redesigned like this. So far some very large towers have been wiped to build more human blocks. I didn't know it was an option to 'refactor' such a big thing but the result is pretty convincing, both in terms of living conditions and cost. Kudos.

Swapping the boring facade for nice glass seems easy compared to updating the interiors to reasonable standard (for example proper kitchen fans need ventilation ducts, which are often missing in old towers like this). I think for a lot of these buildings the economics of refactoring is worse than for rebuilding. When you make large enough changes to existing buildings I suppose you also risk having to bring it up to (current) building code in terms of ventilation, heating, fire safety, ...

I believe the architectural profession suffers similar issues of that in the computer world - namely, newcomers to a project don't really ever want to put in the effort to refactor and more often than not would rather tear everything down and rebuild anew than try to understand the original intention of the architecture, and then fulfill those intentions.

So its sort of refreshing to see this very human instinct being reflected in other fields/professions. Next time I'm confronted with the idea of completely rebuilding some system architecture from scratch, I'll try to keep in mind the sanctity of my position in relation to those of other architects - it may indeed be better to re-facade the system and keep all the original plumbing and services in place, than to tear it down and re-write from scratch. I'm glad we're not the only ones who go through this - and I'm certainly happy to see a positive example of fixing the really important issues in the real world.

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