Thursday December 7th - 19h
s.C1.03

If buildings are the primary constituents of a city, what are they in the city’s permanent transformation process? This evening lecture discusses our buildings’ necessary openness to change. Three perspectives shed light on problems and strategies in the design and (re)use of buildings, which is followed by a discussion with the audience.

In the transition towards a sustainable building culture, buildings should not be constructed at all and adapt the existing city fabric or new buildings must function sustainably, both architecturally and technically. That also means that they are an identity-forming foundation of our environment, which has a societal role and permanently evolves. In times of increasing scarcity of resources, there is today both a need for and vacancy of buildings, often near each other. The absurd problem of the astonishingly short lifespan of many buildings regularly falls back on the very limited sustainability of the architecture itself, not that of its building materials. The history of old and beloved buildings is necessarily also a history of their appropriation, conversion, and continued development.

About Hilde Remøy

Hilde is an associate professor at TU Delft and head of the section Real Estate Management at the Department of Management in the Built Environment (MBE), Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment and research leader of the MBE research programme. Currently, she is a visiting professor at Federico II University of Naples. Hilde Remøy is teaching, researching and publishing on sustainable adaptive reuse management of real estate and heritage and has published several books and numerous scientific articles and book chapters. She graduated from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) before working as an architect at Dutch architecture firms.

About Jörg Leeser

Jörg is an architect and planner. He studied architecture at RWTH Aachen and the Bartlett School of Architecture and graduated from RWTH Aachen before working in offices in New York and Cologne. He is co-founder and director at the architectural office BeL in Cologne. Jörg Leeser held positions as an assistant professor at the RWTH Aachen University and as a visiting professor at the Bergische Universität Wuppertal. Since 2011, he has been a professor of Urban Context at the Peter Behrens School of Arts at the University of Applied Sciences in Düsseldorf.

About Mario Rinke

Mario is a professor at the University of Antwerp. Trained as a civil engineer and working in the field of architecture for many years, he is particularly interested in transformation processes of technical knowledge, materials and institutions. As a structural engineer, he worked for offices in London and Zurich. He received his PhD from ETH Zurich in 2013 and has been a lecturer at the Faculty of Architecture at ETH Zurich and at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, as well as a visiting professor at Tor Vergata University in Rome.