Le Rouge et Le Noir

Reinventing Heritage: A Design Compass on Adaptive Reuse explores adaptive reuse as a central architectural practice for addressing the cultural, environmental, and urban challenges of the contemporary built environment. Produced on the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of Park, a Milan-based interdisciplinary collective of architects, designers, and researchers, the book frames reuse not as a marginal strategy but as a foundational design position grounded in ethical and political responsibility. Rather than functioning as a retrospective celebration, the publication assumes the role of an architectural manifesto oriented toward future practice. Distinct from predominantly academic studies on heritage, the book is authored from within professional practice, combining critical reflection with built experience. It brings together reinterpretations of fifteen significant projects—mainly located in Milan—with contributions and dialogues involving international figures from architecture, art history, industrial design, engineering, urban planning, and photography. This multidisciplinary structure positions adaptive reuse as a broad cultural project rather than a narrowly technical operation. The selected works engage a wide spectrum of existing architectures, including modern landmarks, postwar office buildings, industrial structures, and more anonymous urban fabrics. Across these varied contexts, Park adopts a consistent methodology based on the careful evaluation of a building’s cultural value and construction logic before defining precise intervention strategies. Additions, façade transformations, spatial reconfigurations, and structural adaptations establish a measured dialogue between existing and new elements, emphasizing continuity over rupture. A distinctive pedagogical contribution of the book lies in its graphic apparatus. Plans, sections, elevations, and exploded axonometries employ a red-and-black coding system to differentiate new interventions from preserved components, making the nature and intensity of each transformation legible. Through this visual and critical framework, Reinventing Heritage argues that adaptive reuse is both an ethical necessity and a coherent architectural language, proposing architecture as an “art of editing” that activates heritage as a resource for future design.