The Guardian Features the Museum of the Home

The Royal Institute of British Architects has created the new prize to encourage architects to pour their creativity into refurbishing existing buildings, rather than demolishing them in favour of new-build. If developers replace an existing building with a new one, vast amounts of CO2 are created to make the bricks, cement and steel for the replacement. If instead they can reshape the interior of the existing building while keeping the shell intact, emissions are greatly reduced.

The shortlist for the Reinvention prize includes Wright & Wright's Museum of the Home in London, a repurposing of a building previously scheduled for demolition.

The award is recognition of a new trend. So far, architects have mainly focused on operational carbon – the pollution caused from heating and powering a building. Knocking down a building with poor insulation and replacing it with a more energy-efficient newbuild property may seem an obvious improvement. But the new-build causes large amounts of carbon embodied in the fabric, thereby undermining the green credentials of the replacement.

This is especially true if architects achieve high values of heat and energy conservation in the new-build by using materials with high embodied carbon – such as steel and cement. The ideal project, according to RIBA’s new thinking, is to take an old, leaky building and improve its operational performance by using low-carbon materials such as timber, which actually locks up carbon for the future as the trees grow. 

The new prize was championed by outgoing RIBA president, Simon Allford, who said: “We have a collective responsibility as architects to minimise our impact on the planet’s resources and maximise the societal and economic benefits of our work. The inventive reuse of buildings is critical to reducing carbon emissions and, whilst often not the simplest solution, requires exceptional creativity and vision – I look forward to seeing some inspiring examples in due course.”