Beyond Adaptive Reuse: A Conceptual Framework of Retained Architectural Value
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Abstract
Adaptive reuse was commonly identified through functional change, although projects carrying the same label retained very different degrees of pre-existing architectural order. This article developed Retained Architectural Value as a bounded conceptual construct for interpreting that difference. A qualitative conceptual design was used, supported by an integrative review of secondary scholarly literature and conceptual synthesis. The synthesis distinguished retained architectural value from heritage significance, circular value retention, building adaptability, and general project success. Three substantive domains were identified in the retained architecture. They concerned material–tectonic relations, spatial–configurational relations, and morphological organisation. Architectural legibility was treated separately as an interpretive condition through which those continuities could remain readable after transformation. The resulting framework was deliberately non-metric and did not assign weights or scores. It provided a focused vocabulary for discussing what architectural relations remained meaningful when reuse altered function, fabric, spatial order, and form, while leaving empirical validation and operational measurement to later research.
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References
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