This text continues an inquiry initiated in Low-Res Landscape but shifts its focus. Rather than addressing perceptual activation through estrangement or aesthetic declaration, it examines the misalignment between material persistence and use. Adaptive reuse is approached here not as ecological strategy, but as a condition of misfit: an onto-perceptual interval that emerges when functional expectations fail to coincide with utilitarian possibilities. In landscape architecture, the notion of adaptive reuse quickly frays at the edges. As landscape is always already there, nearly every intervention could be described as reuse, making the category diffuse. What, then, is actually being reused?

Transforming the Aproz Wastewater Treatment System into a Playground, designed by En-Dehors, 2023

A space is too wide a category. So let’s be more specific. While landscape architecture is broadly a profession of adaptation, I am concerned specifically with instances where the material history refuses to be subsumed. If the debris of the past is rendered anonymous, treated merely as invisible ‘fill’, the surplus vanishes. My focus remains on the stubborn artifact: where the past material function remains legible enough to disrupt the total authority of the new assigned use. While there is ecological value in adaptive reuse, I’ll dwell on the perceptual recognition of these clashing functions as they dictate the terms of use.

What I wish to address is the perceptual instability that emerges when simultaneous legibilities co-exist: the “ghost” of the former function and the “insistence” of the new one. This produces a productive inner surplus—a “low-resolution” state of use where the lack of a singular pretext forces the user to negotiate their own relationship with the space. 

Multiple legibilities produce a low-res state in the Crack Garden by Taktyk.

On declining the terminal logic of ruin

When addressing the temporal relations between use, material persistence, and decay, the notion of ruin is difficult to avoid. It is a widely popular term in recent scholarship, particularly by Tim Edensor ^[1] and Caitlin DeSilvey ^[2], who have significantly reworked the concept, treating ruination not as an end state but as an ongoing material, and symbolic process.

Within these accounts, adaptive reuse can be read in incompatible ways: as denying ruin its ruin-ness through reactivation and reuse, as producing ruin through the same acts of transformation, or as extending the life of something already considered an inhabited ruin. The coexistence of these readings points to the instability of ruin as a category; it suggests that when the artifact is ‘stubborn,’ it resists the binary labels of ruin theory altogether.

Despite these revisions, the notion remains bound to a terminal logic in which the cessation, modification, or reactivation of a prior order is read as architectural reduction. Ruin quietly reproduces these binaries of life and death, of use and abandonment that prove of limited value for the present discussion, particularly in landscape architecture, where processes of growth, succession, and open-ended use are already operative conditions. The effects commonly attributed to ruin, including indeterminacy and material persistence, are addressed here through use, normativity, and misalignment.

Architecture is treated as a matrix submitted to processes of life. The notion of ruin depends on the introduction of an “end” and on the figure of the “master architect” as an authority, only for that authority to be subsequently undermined by each change of use, repair, or unscripted intervention. This mechanism performs little analytical work for understanding adaptive reuse as a present-tense condition and its effects. There is also a tendency in some areas of ruin discourse to romanticise decay, turning loss into an aesthetic or moral horizon and I deliberately aim at resisting that impulse.

For these reasons, this text does not position adaptive reuse in relation to ruin, but sets it aside as a primary analytical frame.

Check point at Campbell Barracks in Heidelberg, Germany, opened to free use. The Park of Encounters, 2022, designed by Robin Winogrond Landscape Architecture. Urban Design. + Studio Vulkan Landschaftsarchitektur

Structural misalignment between material persistence and use

The line between what counts as adaptive reuse and what does not is intentionally left undefined. The focus lies instead on the effects produced by misalignment: shifts in normativity and epistemic orientation that emerge when material persistence fails to align cleanly with newly imposed use. This approach isolates a narrow temporal interval, attending to the moment when “before” and “now” collapse within the same structure.

This refusal is not merely a technical leftover. As Brian Larkin notes in his work on infrastructure ^[3], these structures exist as forms separate from their purely technical functioning; they are ‘aesthetic vehicles’ that store within them forms of desire and fantasy. In the case of the stubborn artifact, these fantasies become autonomous from their original function. The surplus, then, is the condition in which the structure drifts from its address, persisting as a ‘fetish-like’ presence even after the duty of use has been subtracted. As Larkin shows, infrastructure already carries surplus; adaptive reuse does not necessarily produce it, but can expose it once the function no longer absorbs it.

Material persistence refers only to what a structure continues to be capable of, support, resist, or suggest despite a change in program. The reused object neither fully withdraws into pure function nor fully presents itself as an object of contemplation. It does not fully occupy either its former or its present regime of use, it is stuck in the liminality. It is precisely this unresolved incompatibility—between what the structure materially insists on and what it is asked to do now—that generates a perceptual interval.

Parking lot-turned garden, leaving the gap open. Folly Forest, designed by Straub Thurmayr Landscape Architects

Surplus as non-resolution

The perceptual surplus associated with adaptive reuse does not originate solely in the designer’s intention. It emerges from pre-existing structural misalignments that arise through historical and political processes – from the messiness of the before. In design terms, these misalignments arrive as conditions rather than authored propositions.

These processes are not accidental in the production of space, yet they are not designed as such. Whether the recognition, identification, or articulation of this interval constitutes a design gesture is not a question that can be resolved categorically. In this sense, adaptive reuse does not necessarily require the designer to create surplus, but to preserve or open it. The designer may recognise an existing misalignment and choose not to resolve it. It occupies a dialectical position between action and restraint.

Highline section three, 2015, NYC, Field Operations

The critical distinction lies not between design and coincidence, but between resolution and non-resolution. Design operates at the level of acknowledgement and decision, and decisions determine whether misalignment is neutralised, ignored, or held active.

Overqualified and under-equipped

Reused structures are overqualified because they contain residual capacities, technical specificity, and materiality exceeding current functional demands. They are simultaneously under-equipped because they fail to match their newly appointed use cleanly and efficiently. This condition differs fundamentally from symbolic ambiguity because interpretation is no longer required in advance; functional exclusivity is simply subtracted from an object or a situation. The uncertainty is operative because it breaks with the legibility of use and demands negotiation and adjustment.

When an object becomes low-res, the environment demands a shift in perception. Following James J. Gibson’s theory of affordances ^[4], we typically perceive environments in terms of what they afford us to do rather than what they signify. However, in these misaligned spaces, affordances do not converge on a single, stable use. Because the artifact is overqualified, multiple clashing actions remain possible. This is the ‘low-resolution’ state: not a lack of information, but a lack of clarity caused by multiple legibilities. The environment cannot be habitually ‘used’; it must first be negotiated.

Schalker Verein, Gelsenkirchen, Germany, 2022, designed by Planergruppe Oberhausen

Following Georges Canguilhem, normativity ^[5] is not imposed as a fixed rule but produced through situated acts of adjustment—that is, through the capacity of subjects to establish, revise, and negotiate norms in response to concrete conditions. Here, misfitting and error are not stigmatized as failures but rather understood as the texture of life as such. In this sense, adaptive reuse does not suspend norms; it exposes them as responsive and does not demand conformity to a pre-given standard.

Against the duty of use

Adaptive reuse often produces effects that are difficult to categorise using conventional architectural terms. These effects are not purely subjective, but arise from specific structural conditions. One example is a sense of relief from the program, from the brief that produced the initial structure. Adaptive reuse, in a sense, reduces the authority of former scripts and rules and leaves them visibly misaligned. This creates a sense of suspended normativity, where rules begin to lose their position and demand re-situation from the side of the user. It is an emplacement of a functional shift of a particular place, as the old may be reflected upon, but ideologically or symbolically reduced or even empty. 

Departure Into the Landscape, Belgium, 2017, Former station platform, redesigned by 100Landschaftsarchitektur

One of the immediate catalysts for this line of thought was a recent article by our colleague Urška Škerl on decommissioning airports. In the course of our colourful editorial exchange in the past few weeks, she politely but firmly resisted my suggestion to dedicate less attention to the economics and ecologies of Tempelhof and instead dwell more on the potential and spatial effects of the leftover structures; on the runway, the axis, the emptiness as persistent conditions – the stubborn artifacts.

In a moment of editorial enthusiasm, I even managed to compare Tempelhof’s runway to the axis of Versailles: structurally present, visually reduced, and ideologically hollowed. A comparison that is likely excessive, yet useful insofar as it foregrounds the persistence of form with all its perceptual effects, after the disappearance of its original programme. As Martin Rein-Cano succinctly described in Topos 133, Tempelhof’s hardware is largely the same, while the software has been updated.

Perhaps the abandoned runway at Tempelhof feels so liberating and, at the same time, hilarious in all its overqualification to accommodate pedestrians and cyclists. When thinking about the simultaneous over- and under-qualification, two different attitudes can be tangible, which may add to those effects:

First, ethical humour between designer and user; the designer refuses to over-instruct. The space implies that the user is capable of figuring things out and that both share an affinity towards play and explorative negotiation of use. This is a withdrawal of signifying master authority much more than its assertion, and aligns with the principle of the equality of intelligences ^[6]. This assumes the user is an active, pre-emancipated actor and that there is no ‘correct way’ of interpreting use or norms embedded in the stubborn artifact. 

Second, structural humour within the object itself. The object displays competence that does not translate into performance, and there is a failure that does not bother to correct itself. As if it wants to provoke those users who want a clear function, high-resolution legibility, landscape served on a plate, so to speak. It is technically sophisticated yet pragmatically awkward, putting that specific user in the same awkward position. So over-equipment coexists with under-performance, and this gap may invite both negotiation and provocation.

Wikado Playground, 2012 Architects / Superuse

This gap simultaneously introduces a sense of effortlessness. Not because the space is easy to use, but because it allows for error without accusation. It strips duty and implies awkwardness as a legitimate situation. It de-electrifies the obligation, the script. The user may be out of place and still remain within the place, without being corrected, instructed, or excluded by the design.

Design surplus as epistemic practice

The value of adaptive reuse is not merely ecological; it is rather an epistemic exercise in collective normativity. When a user successfully negotiates the ‘low-resolution’ rules of a stubborn runway—where hardware no longer matches software—they are practising the revisability of norms. This negotiation implies that the rules of a place are not silently enforced by design, but are instead a social contract to be constantly co-authored by those who inhabit the misfit. In these destabilising operations, the environment may open towards a more democratic negotiation.

Bridgefoot Street Park by DFLA, Dublin, Ireland, 2022, joins both adaptive reuse and newly authored design surplus that disturbs the clarity of function

If spontaneous misalignment is epistemically productive, then deliberately produced misalignment cannot be dismissed on moral grounds without contradiction. Excessive form-making can introduce productive intervals between structure and use, provided it avoids closure. This text does not seek to rehabilitate ego-design, but it does destabilize the categorical exclusion of expressive excess. The problem is not expression itself, but whether a gesture resolves functional alignment or leaves it suspended.

While material and production restraint may be ecological, it might prove productive to move beyond a moralized minimalism that equates expressive restraint with ethical superiority. Design surplus is not synonymous with display, but with the maintenance of ambiguity. By holding the onto-perceptual interval misaligned and refusing affordance completion, design trains perception to operate under conditions of mismatch. Whether this leads to emancipatory processes remains conditional, but it undeniably encourages environments that support negotiation over enforcement, where meaning is ungrounded and thus remains alive.

Shanghai Super Tube: The Cultural Metamorphosis of Infrastructure, 2023, designed by FISH DESIGN

References