Design Solution · Sustainability
Design Solution · Dream about it
Reusing an existing Olympic-legacy hangar instead of new build.
Rather than build new, the museum overhauls a section of the existing Here East hangar, the former Olympic broadcast centre, retaining its industrial structure and character. Reusing the heavy frame and envelope avoids the embodied carbon of a new shed of comparable scale. The raw industrial aesthetic is kept as part of the design.
Adapting a section of the Here East broadcast hangar for the museum overhauling rather than replacing the existing heavy industrial frame is straightforwardly the right embodied-carbon move when the structure is sound and the geometry fits the brief — the retention avoids the carbon cost of a new shed of comparable span and mass, and the raw industrial aesthetic becomes a design asset rather than a constraint to overcome. The practical advantage of reuse at this scale is that the hard structure is already in place, inspected and approved, which removes a significant portion of design and programme risk from the heavy steel and envelope procurement. The complications live in the fit: industrial broadcast buildings were designed for specific MEP loads, acoustic profiles and floor tolerances that a museum programme with sensitive object storage, public environmental control and high pedestrian loads will challenge, and the retrofit cost of bringing those systems up to museum standard can approach or exceed new-build cost depending on the extent of intervention. Heritage planning consent for a former Olympic venue adds a layer of approval risk that a purely new building on a cleared site would not carry. The evidence here is single-project and the record carries no performance data, so the embodied-carbon saving is directionally sound but not quantified; the case for adaptive reuse should be made on life-cycle carbon assessment from the outset, not assumed.
#adaptive reuse #embodied carbon #Olympic legacy