Reuse of Modernist Buildings

Abstract

In his keynote lecture “When the oppressive new and the vulnerable old meet”, at the 13th docomomo Conference in Seoul 2014, Hubert-Jan Henket (1940–) made a passionate plea for “Sustainable Modernity”. In docomomo Journal 52, an invitation to join this plea was published. Hubert-Jan Henket also spoke of a wish to change the curricula at all schools of architecture and include the history of modernity as well as the conservation and adaptive reuse of what is there already as a standard part of the education. Since then, and even before 2014, a lot has happened in exploring the further potential of reusing Modern Movement Architecture. In 2016 the project “RMB Reuse of Modernist Buildings” started. For the RMB project docomomo International and the University of Antwerp, Belgium; the University of Coimbra and the Instituto Superior Técnico – University of Lisboa, both from Portugal; Istanbul Technical University, from Turkey and TH-OWL, Detmold School of Architecture and Interior Architecture from Detmold, Germany, came together to prepare a master course, addressing the subjects as formulated in 2014 by Hubert Jan Henket and docomomo.