Angela Whitaker-Williams, AIA, LEED AP, is a principal at Perkins&Will.

Whitaker-Williams has a definitive opinion on using adaptive reuse of existing infrastructure for her projects.

“I think adaptive reuse is pretty amazing,” she says. “You get to keep the history of the site, and it’s a far more sustainable strategy sometimes than ‘clear-cut everything down and start from scratch.’”

She notes that there’s a lot of built work available to adapt, and the structures are in varying degrees of usefulness for alteration. The first step in evaluating a potential site is to examine all its assets to determine the best use for each facility and how it will relate to the surrounding community. Her goal is to create something new and improved that doesn’t lose its history and better serves communities as they change.

An Award-Winning Example

One of her favorite projects is the Austin Community College (ACC) Highland, which repurposed an abandoned mall built in the 1970s. Another developer turned the surrounding parking lots into mixed-use developments, while Whitaker-Williams helped design the educational space from the “bones” of the decaying mall (BGK was the project co-designer and architect of record).

Long before the mall was built, the site was home to the St. John’s Encampment, a place where African Americans came to learn trades and have religious services. Whitaker-Williams is proud they were able to turn the space back into a place of education open to all levels of the community.

“We considered ways that all of the programs inside tied to the network of jobs in the surrounding areas, so this adaptive reuse builds up and gives people opportunity,” she explains.

Understand What You Have

According to Whitaker-Williams, the first step on such a project is to fully examine the site to determine what can be reused and what needs to be discarded. Her team began with a full salvage expedition at the mall. Reusable items included glass from the old storefronts, a neon sign from a photo lab and even a Santa’s chair for the theater arts program.

They found problems that needed to be addressed in some of the foundations and structures that were built for a shopping mall and not a modern higher-education facility. Navigation was another area where a mall design was incompatible, as malls were meant to retain customers as much as possible. The structure needed more windows and doors to make navigation much easier.

To fix some of these deficiencies, one of the first decisions was to cut a chunk from the middle of the mall, which created a central paseo that displayed the work of ACC students and allowed the community to filter into the space and become part of it. This area also contains a restaurant and theater to bring students and community members further together. Whitaker-Williams admits that removing such a large piece is unusual for an adaptive reuse, but it worked very well in this circumstance.

“It was about putting ACC on display, and pulling the community in to interact,” she notes.

Collaboration also was a theme when developing the college’s educational components, so the departments and students could interact with each other in a beneficial environment.

“We have a room set up where you’d have lights that you could clip on for drama and high-tech for animation, and sound systems so you could come in with the music-performance people and play music and do acts and animations all together,” she continues. “That’s how we all function in the real world. None of us work in isolation. The infrastructure of the mall gave us that big floor plate width to be able to create these cross-collaboration moments that are so exciting.”

Lessons Learned

Through ACC Highland and other adaptive reuse projects, Whitaker-Williams learned many valuable lessons, and she’s more than willing to pass them along to other engineers and designers.

“The first piece of adaptive reuse is knowing that your ‘bones’ are in great shape, and then understanding what pieces you can carry forward and get creative with,” she explains. “That glass we salvaged, we used it in wall applications or in frames, but we also ground up some of it and put it in flooring and concrete and used it as aggregate. Get creative with what your building materials offer you.”

And for those still uncertain about how to use adaptive reuse techniques, Whitaker-Williams has a simple suggestion: “Give me a call.”

“We’ve been publishing quite a few papers and been really studying this for a while,” she adds. “Adaptive reuse isn’t a super-new concept, but taking adaptive reuse and really applying strong sustainability strategies is the wave of the future.”