Níall McLaughlin to headline inaugural AJ Retrofit Live event

McLaughlin, whose new library at Cambridge’s Magdalene College won the UK's highest architectural award last month, will be joined during the day-long event by leading industry voices including Indy Johar, Kate Macintosh, Kunle Barker, Catherine Croft, Duncan Baker-Brown, and Enlai Hooi of Danish practice Schmidt Hammer Lassen.

The packed programme of talks and discussions in the City of London will bring together architects, their built environment colleagues, developers, clients and lawmakers to identify the best retrofit and circular economy practices and discuss the transformational changes needed to upgrade the built environment in line with whole-life carbon principles.

McLaughlin’s practice is best known for exemplary new build work, but he will touch on the profession’s approach to the retrofit and reuse agenda, taking in the current barriers and how these might be overcome.

‘The present focus on the reuse of existing buildings is related directly to the imperatives of the climate emergency,’ he told the AJ.

‘We assume that a building retrofit has lower embodied carbon than a newly built structure. In my talk, I will suggest that this practical justification for reuse could be associated with a more comprehensive change in our view of what architecture is. Once we conceive of buildings that are continually altered through time, we change our emphasis on the unique architectural artefact and we can begin to consider architecture as a long, unfolding process.’

‘Buildings, in this new perspective, are conceptually unfinishable’

McLaughlin went on: ‘Buildings, in this new perspective, are conceptually unfinishable. They have no privileged or absolute identity that can be fixed in time or even conserved. It is, therefore, possible to reconceive architecture as being primarily performative. This insight might point us back to the origins of architecture.’