Recycled buildings : challenging sustainability in an era of air conditioning

It is now often said that the greenest building is one that is already built. But as we approach the question of re-using buildings very different issues and challenges come up when compared to other discussions about recycling. In contrast to the recycling of consumer goods, the built environment involves questions of planning, urban development, legislation and an unclear disaggregation of who are the customers, producers and end users. As such then there are very different ideas of responsibility involved. The majority of recycling debates typically focus on the present or recent past, but in buildings we are faced with the ideas, visions, politics and failures of previous years, decades or centuries. To ask the question about recycling buildings is thus a consideration of the possibilities and limitations of recycling the past, in all its material, concrete, earthy and immovable forms. As we will see, the recycling of buildings is increasingly featured in discussions about sustainability and the reduction of energy consumption, with the re-use of existing structures having very real benefits over newly constructed ââ"šÂ¬Ã‹Å“ecoââ"šÂ¬Ã¢"žÂ¢ or ââ"šÂ¬Ã‹Å“greenââ"šÂ¬Ã¢"žÂ¢ architecture. This is particularly applicable in the face of an epidemic of architectural design now spreading across regions like Southeast Asia, that of electronic air conditioning (AC). In the pages that follow, the emergence of electronic air conditioning is seen as a pivotal transition in urban design and living, such that two phases of modernity are identified: the pre-conditional and conditional. Across Asia there is an extensive stock of buildings designed and built in a pre-conditional era, which kept occupants ââ"šÂ¬Ã¢â‚¬Å“ human and non-human ââ"šÂ¬Ã¢â‚¬Å“ cool and comfortable in the heat and humidity, without requiring energy intensive forms of electronic air conditioning. This paper considers the degree to which Asiaââ"šÂ¬Ã¢"žÂ¢s ââ"šÂ¬Ã‹Å“modernââ"šÂ¬Ã¢"žÂ¢ pre-conditional architecture constructed over the last 100 years or so can be recycled and re-used without modification for AC today, in the quest for a more sustainable, less energy dependent built environment. To head in such directions, it will be argued we need to move beyond current debates about tropical architecture design, adaptive re-use and urban planning and engage with a series of wider political, cultural and socio-technical forces. Given the limited space here, the paper presents this position by focusing specifically on some of the ways in which ââ"šÂ¬Ã‹Å“the material imagination of airââ"šÂ¬Ã¢"žÂ¢ has shifted over the last 150 years or so and how this bears upon the future of sustainable urbanism in regions like Southeast Asia. The argument advanced is that under the conditions of modernity,