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Our spanking new buildings will fall in demolition derby
• YOUR report on the problems at Moorfields Eye Hospital provides a salutary lesson for anyone who thinks that a spanking new building is the only answer to accommodation troubles (Eye hospital hit by leaky pipes shock, October 2). Ashmount School, also featured in your letters page last week, comes to mind.
The performance of new buildings is no better, and can be worse, than the performance of good, properly refurbished, reinvigorated old buildings, which, incidentally, also cost less in money and energy.
New and old buildings alike need the same amount of regular care and maintenance. Structures become tired and rundown not because they are poor buildings – quite the contrary in the case of Ashmount School and Finsbury Health Centre – but because their owners fail to provide the effective, timely maintenance that every building needs.
We can confidently predict, on the same historically persistent basis, that very many of the current spate of sparkling new social buildings, schools and health centres will be in a similar sorry state in 30 years’ time and there’ll be calls to pull them down in favour of smashing new eye-catching buildings.
The arguments in favour of their demolition will be same as now.
This is only sustainable, as it always has been, if you take the view that prevails in energy-rich cultures that our stock of buildings is a depreciating asset, like cars or fridges, that should be periodically scrapped. Not many of us share that view
David Gibson
Islington Building Preservation Trust |
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