Micro-Climate Blog: An Above-Ground View: Climate and Historic Buildings

By Marcy Rockman, Lifting Rocks Climate and Heritage Consulting, for the SHA Climate Heritage Initiative

Perspective on historic buildings today. This op-Ed from NY state speaks up about adaptive reuse of older buildings, with particular attention to how this allows for maintenance of local architectural character and history. I’m not remotely arguing against this, but this point reminds me that we seldom talk about why we see and understand older buildings to have character and newer buildings (generally speaking) to have less, how this reflects current allocation of planning power and financial control, and the challenges of developing new alternate paths. For example, development of new approaches for mass production of modular housing is an effort to address real issues in housing shortages (NYT, will add gift link close to time of posting: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/18/opinion/editorials/housing-costs-modular-homes.html), but which may further erode use of local and historical architectural styles and their connections to local environments and climates  without careful attention to these factors.

Featured Link: https://www.goerie.com/story/opinion/columns/2024/07/28/reusing-historic-buildings-economic-preserve-culture-identity-erie-brennan/74441370007/

For a listing of all blog posts in this series, visit our Climate Heritage Initiative page.

Photo credit: Architectural rendering of planned adaptive reuse of the 1890-1940 Erie Malleable Iron facility, captured from Brennan, D., Demolition or reuse of historic buildings? It’s a question of community values. GoErie (2024). https://www.goerie.com/story/opinion/columns/2024/07/28/reusing-historic-buildings-economic-preserve-culture-identity-erie-brennan/74441370007/