As existing buildings age, nearly half of all construction activity in Britain is related to maintenance, refurbishment and conversions. Building adaptation is an activity that continues to make a significant contribution to the workload of the construction industry. Given its importance to sustainable construction, the proportion of adaptation works in relation to new build is likely to remain substantial for the foreseeable future, especially in the developed parts of the world. Building Adaptation, Second Edition is intended as a primer on the physical changes that can affect older properties. It demonstrates the general principles, techniques, and processes needed when existing buildings must undergo alteration, conversion, extension, improvement, or refurbishment. The publication of the first edition of Building Adaptation reflected the upsurge in refurbishment work. The book quickly established itself as one of the core texts for building surveying students and others on undergraduate and postgraduate built environment courses. This new edition continues to provide a comprehensive introduction to all the key issues relating to the adaptation of buildings. It deals with any work to a building over and above maintenance to change its capacity, function or performance.

Old Materials, New Climate: Traditional Building Materials in a Changing World is an accessible guidebook to understanding historic materials – how they were traditionally made, how they survived the test of time, and how changes in climate are now impacting materials in new ways. Protecting historic buildings from a rapidly changing and unpredictable climate requires an understanding of how climate affects weather and how weather affects the durability of the most widely used traditional materials – wood, adobe, brick, lime, concrete, metal, and paint. This resource examines how gradual and dramatic changes in climate threaten to accelerate normal weathering and presents strategies to safeguard historic materials for future generations. Illustrated case studies explore how weather is affecting materials in specific historic buildings in climate zones in the United States and across the globe. Drawing on the work of experts in conservation, biology, chemistry, and environmental impacts, this book is an invaluable resource for any student, preservationist, architect, or contractor interested in expanding their knowledge of materials and why they perform as they do.

Building in existing fabric requires more than practical solutions and stylistic skills. The adaptive reuse of buildings, where changes in the structure go along with new programs and functions, poses the fundamental question of how the past should be included in the design for the future. On the background of long years of teaching and publishing, and using vivid imagery from Frankenstein to Rem Koolhaas and beyond, the author provides a comprehensive introduction to architectural design for adaptive reuse projects. History and theory, building typology, questions of materials and construction, aspects of preservation, urban as well as interior design are dealt with in ways that allow to approach adaptive reuse as a design practice field of its own right.

An ambitious history of Britain told through the stories of twenty-five notable structures, from the Iron Age fortification of Maiden Castle in Dorset to the Gherkin. Building Britannia is a chronicle of social, political and economic change seen through the prism of the country's built environment, but also a sequence of closely observed studies of a series of intrinsically remarkable structures: some of them beautiful or otherwise imposing; some of them more coldly functional; all of them with richly fascinating stories to tell. Steven Parissien tells both a national story, tracing how a growing sense of British nationhood was expressed through the country's architecture, and also examines how these structures were used by later generations to signpost, mythologise or remake British history. Rubbing shoulders with some 'expected' building choices – the Roman baths at Aquae Sulis, the early Gothic splendour of Lincoln Cathedral and the Tudor jewel that is Little Moreton Hall – are some striking inclusions that promise to open doors into what will be, for many readers, less familiar areas of social history: these include The Briton's Protection, a Regency pub close in Manchester city centre and the Edwardian Baroque Electric Cinema in Notting Hill, one of the country's oldest working cinemas. Thus as well as identifying the relevance of certain iconic structures to the unfolding of the national story, Building Britannia finds fascination and meaning in the everyday and the disregarded.

Traditional farmsteads and farm buildings make an important contribution to the remarkably varied character of England's landscape. They are fundamental to its sense of place and local distinctiveness. Although the majority of traditional farm buildings have now become partly or wholly redundant for modern agricultural purposes unsupported by income to fund their maintenance and repair, they often have the potential to be of economic value in terms of their capacity to accommodate a variety of new uses. Successful adaptive reuse of any farmstead or building depends upon an understanding of its significance, its relationship to the wider landscape setting and its sensitivity to and capacity for change. This advice is aimed at owners of farm buildings, building professionals and local authority planning and conservation officers. It explains how significance can be retained and enhanced through well-informed maintenance and sympathetic development, provided that repairs, design and implementation are carried out to a high standard. This replaces The Conversion of Traditional Farm Buildings published September 2006.