

Tour Bois-le-Prêtre: transformation of a housing block (2012) - design-of-homes
http://designofhomes.co.uk/042-tour-bois-le-pretre.html

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agumonkey
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.

~~~
alkonaut
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, ...

~~~
fit2rule
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.

