I like “Why we need a ‘structure first’ approach to existing buildings” by Penny Gowler, which is perhaps not surprising since I’m a structural engineer. I’m going to argue here that Ms. Gowler’s article and my position are just slightly more nuanced than that.
Architectural design of new buildings does not start tabula rasa. There are constraints: the site geometry, the local weather, zoning and building codes, and so on. Within those constraints,, however, architects have some freedom to place functions where they want and arrange the future use based on their design concept. This freedom is best seen in bubble diagrams, where the whole design is reduced to a form of reality flowchart, with only room adjacencies and relative sizes visible.
Design in existing buildings has, at least in theory, another large constraint: the existing structure. You can ignore it if you want, which in my experience leads to massive problems. A long time ago, I was working on the conversion of several connected rowhouses to apartments. The houses were all nominally 20 feet wide, meaning that the interior spaces were 19 feet wide. The developer had been informed by his real-estate sales consultant that he would get the maximum sale price for the new apartments if they were at least 22 feet wide. So he had his architect prepare plans where all of the interior structure would be demolished so that the apartments could be made three feet wider. I don’t know if the price would be maximized by that three feet change, but I do know that demolishing 90 percent of the usable existing structure on that basis was ridiculous. If you want nominally 23-foot buildings, don’t buy 20-foot buildings.
The constraint applied by the existing structure is subtler than that applied by the lot or by codes. You can ignore it if you want, at the cost of wasting money, time, landfill space, energy, carbon emissions, and likely the good will of your neighbors. I generally don’t anthropomorphize buildings, since they don’t “want” anything, but following the path laid out by the existing structure can save you a lot of trouble.
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Above, a photo of books being removed from the Astor Library on Lafayette Street, probably to be moved to the new New York Public Library on 42nd Street. The Astor had merged with two other libraries to form the NYPL, and moved out in 1911. That building was later reused as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society and then, since the 1960s, as the Public Theater. How does a building constructed in the 1850s and expanded later in the nineteenth century continue in use in 2024 for a complete different use? Because the conversion, by architect Giorgio Cavaglieri, was based on what the existing building could be, rather than on an isolated image of what was needed.
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