READER REVIEW 2 : OLD vs NEW

In my opinion, I personally think that old and new are two important things that should combined or blend together to recreate “the New Old “, which is something new but it actually derived from the old things.  To define New and Old, New means modern and recent. It is a breakthrough, something we never really seen before, or it’s something just come into existence recently. While for Old, it means ancient which is something dating from the remote past or something persisting from an earlier time.  As I have mentioned, based on human psychology fact, everyone loves seeing new things but still missing and reminisce about the old things. Just like everyone of us easily get attracted by beautiful creative things but are so amazed by the ancient masterpieces. So, why do we demolish old things to build new things?

“We need old buildings to make a great cities, but we need new ones too”. This phrase has become nowadays society issue and to be solved by all the new born architects. Therefore the designers nowadays came out with the concept of “adaptive reuse” which embedded in current conservation thinking. It’s an idea of finding new beneficial uses for old redundant historical building or should say, giving new life into old ruins.

Why should we creating new uses to the old ruins? The idea of it is actually more environment conservative and preservative. As the faithful son of the mother Earth, we are responsible to preserve our Earth from being severe hurt. It’s important to keep our habitat healthy, safe and clean. It the best to prevent demolition that might causes bad impact to our environment as a lot of trees might be cut down or burned off due to demolition of a new land. The animals will lost their habitats and homelands and die eventually. Demolition of a massive building might need the uses of explosive substances. Demolition of old building will gives out dusty particles that will pollute the air and affect human’s health. It will also causes noise pollution as the sound of explosion is tremendous. And also, the purpose of creating new life into old ruins is for material savings, to cut down the wastage of materials during a new building construction. Sooner in future, the ideation of “new old” might be a new trend for the city and society in it could became 21^st century architecture new style. Furthermore, some of the old buildings are too precious to be removed. They all have their historical values and needed to be remembered by all. For example, the Colosseum in Rome and the Pisa Tower in Italy (overseas), Kellie’s Castle in Perak and A Famosa Fort in Melaka (domestic).

There are actually few ways of bringing redundant historical buildings back into uses. Intervention is the best way to solve this problems. There are actually 3 ways of intervention (refer picture down there). The 1^st one is to build inside the ruin. This method tends to express ruins most fully but have the difficult in making weather-tight seal between old and new. The 2^nd one is to build on the ruin. It is the interface between the old and new can be seen both sided. The 3^rd one is to build over the ruin. This provides the simplest and least destructive solution as the ruin is being enclosed inside a building.

Where old meets new, for example the Louvre Museum in Paris is the extreme modern interventions in historical environment. It has now become the iconic building in Paris, France. The modern glass pyramid in the middle of historical monuments was once unthinkable in UK but it is now famous over the world. The Louvre Museum is where the worldwide famous painting, Mona Lisa is located.

The Blencow Hall in Cumbria is another example of old meets new. The Blencow Hall was initially a fort mansion house but it was then converted into a luxury country hotel. The south tower of the building was a roofless ruin and had sustained a large breach in its east wall, possibly as a result of ‘slighting’ in the Civil War (partial destruction designed to deny the use of fortifications to the enemy) combined with later structural settlement. The local architect called Graham Norman has redesigned the building to bring the towers back into use as part of a luxury country hotel. There will be a modern structure built inside the old hall. 

The third example will be the Kolumba Musuem in Cologne. St Kolumba Church was badly damaged during the 2nd world war and was transformed into a memorial garden during the 1950s. Due to surrounded by commercial development, the ruins gradually becoming serious and a collection of temporary roof structures protecting the delicate archaeological excavations, the Archdiocese of Cologne commissioned Swiss architect Peter Zumthor to build a new museum to house its collection of religious art with the ruins of St Kolumba accommodated within it. The new structure is actually built over the old building and fused to the walls of ruined medieval church as to shelter the original.

    As conclusion, I strongly agree that old and new can be fused together to create some intervention which is unique and special. Rather than siding old or new, I prefer both of them comes together as one.