Carnegie Libraries of Britain: Assets or Liabilities? Managing Altering Agendas of Energy Efficiency for Early 20th Century Heritage

ABSTRACT

After over a century of service, many Carnegie library buildings in Britain are at risk, often condemned for presumed poor energy performance with heritage protection perceived as a further burden to negotiate. Although most now have heritage status, saving them from demolition, demands to meet changing agendas for efficiency mean that increasingly these buildings are being sold and re-used. A more nuanced reading of measures of performance is necessary. By interrogating operational data in context and establishing indicators for life-cycle analysis, this paper aims to offer generalizable steps to justify their continued service in promoting wellbeing.

KEYWORDS:

• Carnegie Libraries
• heritage Life Cycle Analysis
• sustainable Building Conservation

Declaration of interest statement

No potential competing interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-license/version/3/

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council “Shelf Life: Re-imagining the future of Carnegie Public Libraries” project [grant number AH/P002587/1] (https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=AH%2FP002587%2F1)

Notes on contributors

Oriel Prizeman

Professor Oriel Prizeman is a specialist conservation architect, she holds a chair in Sustainable Building Conservation at the Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff University. She is author of “Philanthropy and Light: Carnegie Libraries and the advent of Transatlantic Standards for Public Space” Ashgate, 2012 and editor of “Sustainable Building Conservation” RIBA publications, 2015. Her first degree and PhD are from the University of Cambridge and her diploma and RIBA part III from the Architectural Association. She was a board member of the US-based Association for Preservation Technology from 2015-17 and is currently Principal Investigator for a 40-month AHRC funded project: “Shelf-Life: Re-imagining the Future of Carnegie Public Libraries.”

Mahdi Boughanmi

Mahdi Boughanmi is a research assistant in the AHRC funded Shelf-life project Welsh school of Architecture, Cardiff University and a BIM specialist and Building surveyor at PointBIM, Cardiff. He is currently working on parametric libraries of building elements, creating a HBIM resource for historic buildings using laser scan data and historic sources and photographs. He holds a B.Arch in Architecture at IUAV university of Venice, Italy (2013) and graduated in M.Sc in Technical Innovation and Design of Urban Systems from the same university (2016). By studying the issues of the land management, he had the opportunity to approach the ‘Smart City’ concept and realized that the city should be seen as a system of systems which could interact and be empowered by new approaches and methodologies that can be introduced through new technologies such as the use of ICT and IoT paradigm in the urban context. His main interests are rooted on the use of the new available technologies to deal with complexities in the Project Management in Architecture and the Urban Planning in a sustainable way.

Camilla Pezzica

Camilla Pezzica is a research assistant in the AHRC funded Shelf-life project at the Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff University and a PhD candidate at the University of Pisa, Italy. She conducts interdisciplinary research in the fields of Town Planning and Architecture aimed at supporting experts’ decision-making processes in different contexts, with a focus on digital survey techniques, modeling and spatial analysis. Her interests are in the integration of advanced digital technologies and computational methods with traditional knowledge management systems, design and planning workflows, aimed at dealing better with the complexities of the contemporary built environment.