In memoir-manifesto, architect Jeanne Gang makes the case for using what’s already there | Canada Voices

Jeanne Gang, one of the world’s most prominent architects, has a message for us all: stop making new buildings.

In her recent book, The Art of Architectural Grafting, Ms. Gang establishes a new theme for building design, encouraging people to work with what’s there and help it grow into something different and productive.

For Gang, the horticultural technique of grafting, combining two different plants so that they grow together and share certain desirable qualities, provides a useful metaphor for extending existing buildings. “You are adding onto to something” – a plant or a structure – “that has more capacity, and allowing it to turn into something else.”

Ms. Gang’s book, part memoir and part manifesto, captures an attitude that is rippling through the world of design. The vision of a building as a work of art is being supplanted by a vision of architecture as varied, flexible and changeable.

The logic is partly environmental. “Architecture has to change to address the climate crisis,” Ms. Gang said “For 20 years, the conversation has been all about making buildings more efficient. But when you look at how many buildings already exist, and the embodied carbon in them, it’s crucial to use what we have.”

Schooled as an engineer and an architect, winner of a McArthur “Genius Grant,” the Chicago-based Ms. Gang has created a diverse body of work. Studio Gang’s portfolio includes flashy high rises, a renovation to the American Museum of Natural History in New York and a plan for the remarkable Tom Lee Park in Memphis.

In Grafting, her argument is similarly multilayered. Architecture, she writes, must address the climate crisis and use its imperatives to spur creativity.

“In truly grafted architecture,” Ms. Gang writes, the new parts would depend on the old, “and the two would be bound together, supporting one another in a vital exchange.” In Grafting, she traces this theme in Studio Gang’s work and wanders the history of forestry and horticulture.

What does a grafted building look like? One example is Studio Gang’s Beloit Powerhouse, a Wisconsin power plant converted to a student centre and athletic centre. New uses for a big old masonry building – we’ve seen this model for decades in galleries such as London’s Tate Modern.

However, Ms. Gang suggests that grafting can be more nuanced. Take the Natural History Museum project, known as the Gilder Center. It created photogenic cave-like formations of sprayed concrete. But in Ms. Gang’s telling, the project’s essence is in the subtle logic of passageways and structural supports. Ten connections link adjacent wings of the Manhattan museum, and a new steel skeleton shifts loads efficiently onto the existing structure. The new and the old enhance each other.

Architects’ manifestos tend to be immodest. (Take Le Corbusier’s 1923 cry: “The age of the architects is coming!”) In the 1990s, when some architects acquired auteur status, they were praised for idiosyncratic buildings that spoke loudly and didn’t listen much. In Grafting, Ms. Gang takes a contrary position in favour of radical modesty.

The core of this approach is known as “adaptive reuse,” converting old buildings for new purposes. But Ms. Gang questions the mores of professional heritage preservation. In North America, heritage is often tied to anti-growth sentiments, and the heritage field typically likes new buildings to defer to the old.

“That’s different than this idea of grafting, which is about protecting life,” Ms. Gang says. “Life, in a building, is letting it grow and letting it expand. It’s more about engendering new life than it is about protection.”

These ideas, as Ms. Gang acknowledges, are already in the air. Her book is in conversation with a long and now revitalized European tradition. She cites the examples of mid-20th-century Venetian architect Carlo Scarpa and Paris’s Lacaton Vassal, who won the Pritzker Prize in 2021. She praises Belgian office ROTOR and its work to salvage building materials, part of a larger discussion about the “circular economy” that’s coming to Canada through the work of such firms as Giaimo and Half Climate Design.

Still, it’s important to see a leader of the architecture world come down so firmly in favour of self-effacement, economy and efficiency. These ideas need to become unavoidable.

At the same time, reuse cannot be the only answer to climate mitigation. In North America, real climate action also requires our cities to become denser and less car-centric.

But that important work can be done while retaining older buildings, or pieces of them. Some of the most beautiful places in our cities are where the past and present are in conversation. And if architects no longer get to be sculptors, they can become part of a larger conversation about caretaking, carbon and deeper forms of beauty.