In a week and a half, I will be a panelist at the event “Progress and Preservation: Reuse for a Resilient City” organized by the Municipal Art Society of New York. Wednesday, May 6, 8:30 to 2, at 165 West 65th Street, 10th Floor; tickets are available at the first link.
The MAS has long been involved with historic preservation; this event uses that framework (“advance climate goals, and sustain the cultural life of our neighborhoods”) to discuss adaptive reuse in general, and to deal with New York’s housing short in specific. The first panel will be discussing policy and I expect to learn from it. I’m on the second panel, which will be discussing practical issues in reuse. Astonishingly, I will be discussing structural engineering issues in building reuse, starting with one of our projects and then going wherever the conversation takes us. I can’t say what I’m going to say since it’s contingent on what the moderator and other panelists say…which is the point of panels.
A note on technology: I write blog posts in Obsidian, which stores notes as plain text using Markdown for formatting. Each note is its own small file stored locally on my computer. I edit there and then copy the text to WordPress for publication in the blog. The transfer from text file to blog post is not seamless. For example, the title of today’s post is the title of the MAS event, and includes a colon. HTML files, and web-related activities in general, are okay with colons in names; the Windows and Mac filesystems are not. So I used a hyphen in the draft and corrected to a colon after the transfer. A small extra step required because of some limits of the tech I’m using.
What does this have to do with today’s topic? A lot of reuse hinges on making old buildings work with modern interiors and with modern mechanical, plumbing, and electric services. Minor mismatches between past and present construction technology are a lot of the work – on some projects maybe the bulk of the work.
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