A second chance for old buildings

In the Netherlands, both the office market and housing market show a mismatch between supply and demand, quantitatively and qualitatively. In 2007 almost 14% of all offices are vacant, i.e. 5.9 million square meters. At the same time we see a shortage of about 1 million dwellings. A building must be able to be changed over its life cycle to adapt to the inevitable evolving needs of it’s end users. The first real challenge is how to make adaptable buildings without creating unnecessary redundancy. The second challenge is the re-use of old vacant buildings because the available area for erecting new ones is very scarce in the Netherlands. In this matter, old buildings deserve a second chance in their life cycle. We need to be able to measure the transformation potential of office buildings both at location and at building level. To this end, we have developed what we call a ‘transformation potential meter’ (Geraedts, Van der Voordt, 2003, 2004). The meter has been tested since 2004 in practice by a number of market players, and by students of architecture. This has allowed the transformation potential meter to be evaluated and refined in 2006. Two new steps - the financial feasibility scan and the risk assessment checklist – have also been added. In this paper, we describe the principle of the new transformation potential meter.