Rundown buildings exist in every city, relicts of times past, reminders of what could be if only the properties hadn’t been so neglected. Some have character, others don’t.
But for Peter Moonen, many have more value than most people think. Citing a study by the Athena Sustainable Materials Institute in Ottawa, Moonen says that a mere fraction of buildings – just three to four per cent – have structural issues that require demolition.
“You’ve got 95-plus per cent of buildings that still have a use but they no longer serve the owners’ purposes,” explains Moonen, leader of the Canadian Wood Council’s Sustainable Building Coalition. “The building envelope and the foundations generally have full integrity and the building is perfectly usable.”
The decision owners face is whether to renovate a building with an eye to accommodating new users; deconstruct it in order to salvage materials for reuse or recycling; or demolish and rebuild from scratch.
Demolition may be the easiest way to obtain a blank slate for future development, but Moonen feels owners need to take a close look at alternatives that could extend the life of old buildings.
“There are two strategies for building longevity – one is making the building so that it can be readily adaptable,” he says. “The other aspect is how can we recover the components. That is a tougher one to do.”
Demolition
Demolition is the last option for Diane Switzer, executive director of the Vancouver Heritage Foundation, but one she can’t avoid acknowledging.
With half the buildings in Canada built before 1970, and demolition of the average 2,500-square-foot house generating approximately 60 tons of debris, Switzer says the renewal of Canada’s housing stock needs to take into account the load this will – literallly – place on the country’s landfills.
“Demolishing to build new green buildings is not the best course of action. We need to make better use of what we’ve already built. It’s simply not sustainable to demolish and build everything new.”
Construction waste typically accounts for 27 per cent of materials entering landfills, but pilot programs in Vancouver over the past two years have demonstrated opportunities for making demolition more efficient. A project in 2011 funded by Metro Vancouver and overseen by Vancouver’s Light House Sustainable Building Centre saw 85 per cent of waste from one East Vancouver project diverted from landfill. A separate project commissioned by Vancouver city council saw just seven per cent of demolition debris sent to landfill.
Still, as these projects underscore, there will always be some level of waste, and Switzer would like people to be aware of the options available when it comes to demolition.
“How do you create exciting uses for older buildings in order to give them life for another century?” she asks. “Take a close look at what’s already there and how you can reuse it.”
Deconstruction
One way of giving new life to old buildings is by reusing their components.
The Vancouver Heritage Foundation maintains a warehouse in Richmond where windows, doors, sinks and other components are received and offered to people renovating older homes at a discount from what the items would cost in an antique store or the contemporary equivalent would cost at a building supplies store.
Similarly, Jack’s New and Used in Burnaby and the Bent Nail in Abbotsford are among the retail depots providing homeowners with cheap access to items salvaged from older buildings.
The practice isn’t new, but it received a boost in 2011 when Vancouver councillors adopted the Greenest City Action Plan with the goal of making Vancouver the greenest city in the world by 2020. One of the direct results of the plan was the creation of a deconstruction permit as an alternative to a demolition permit. The permit fast-tracks building demolitions that commit to diverting at least 75 per cent of demolition waste from the landfill.
Applicants for a deconstruction permit must provide city staff with a work plan outlining how waste will be managed and a report on how the plan was fulfilled.
While some materials – such as asbestos, paints and gyprock – are banned from landfills, the deconstruction permit is an incentive to salvage as much as possible in exchange for a faster approval process.
“It helps to divert material [from the landfill] that’s not otherwise banned,” explains deputy city manager Sadhu Johnston. “We also help people reduce what they’re consuming, because now people that are trying to renovate their homes in town can get their hands on some of this reuse material and they don’t need to go and buy new material.”
Johnston would ultimately like to see a registry connecting vendors and buyers of salvaged materials, and potentially a depot for the materials near downtown Vancouver so urban homeowners have easy access to them.
Eric Karsh, principal of Vancouver engineering firm Equilibrium Consulting Inc., didn’t have to go far to find salvaged timber for two schools – Mer et Montagne in Campbell River and Au Coeur de l’Ile in Comox – he recently worked on with architect McFarland Marceau Architects Ltd.
The projects incorporate old-growth timbers from the buildings the schools formerly occupied.
One of the barriers to reusing wood is often a need to strip it of nails and other metals, allowing it to be replaned.
“You’d think because the wood is free it’s going to be cheaper, but in fact by the time you clean up the wood you’ve often spent a little more money than you would if you bought the wood new,” Karsh explains.
But timbers salvaged from the original Vancouver Island schools were rough-sawn and in pristine condition, requiring very little rehabilitation. In the case of Mer et Montagne, 30-foot beams from the old building continued as roof joists in the new building.
The school in Comox was larger, so the original timbers were put to a variety of other uses, from window perlins to flooring. Some were also used as joists and outfitted with Sherpa connectors from Austria that allow the timbers to be removed and reused in the future. Similar technology is being used in construction of the new Earth Sciences building at UBC in Vancouver, set to complete in August 2012.
“The economics of reusing wood work only when the wood can be salvaged relatively easily,” Karsh says. “If you’re keeping that in mind, you can make choices that will make reusability of the material in the future a lot easier, and therefore economically viable.”
Renovation and reuse
Vancouver architect Michael Green takes reuse a step further. Green recently oversaw the renovation of North Vancouver’s new city hall. The original structure was expanded to incorporate a structure that previously housed the city’s public library.
“The reason buildings get torn down is they say it’s too expensive to fix them seismically, or it’s too expensive to fix them from an energy point of view, and I think nine times out 10 that’s not correct,” Green says.
Combining the existing city hall with the former library required seismic upgrades to the latter, and the creation of an atrium to create a single space, but by working with the existing structures and salvaging building materials, Green says the overall cost of the project was low relative to the volume of space created
“Ultimately, the owner’s got to have a lot more area than they would have had if they took that same budget tore it to the ground and built a brand new building,” he says.
Green sees the potential for similar projects as the redevelopment of former industrial properties in East Vancouver gains momentum. He points to the Salient Group’s award-winning work on the Alhambra block in Gastown and the upscale renovation of the former Keefer Hotel as examples of what’s possible.
“What people crave are unique spaces, not cookie-cutter spaces. What reuse gives you is these really special conditions, unique living spaces, unique offices spaces, that you wouldn’t go out and build from scratch,” he says.
“There’s been this phenomenon where you could tear down a building, build a new one and slap a LEED gold label on it and say you’ve done something good for the planet. I think that’s a problem. We need to realize that saving buildings is the first step toward doing something for the planet.”
