As-Built, As It Were

Abstract

A growing number of environmental, technological, and cultural reasons support the case for greater attention to the existing building stock and expanding practices of building alteration. And with it, renewed attention to architecture’s central instrument for documenting existing buildings: the as-built. Commonly overlooked as a sterile service instrument, the as-built is exposition for new architectural acts. Presented here are a series of experiments and investigations into expanding the narrative value of the as-built, carried out as part of a graduate course taught at Tulane University, and an accounting of the professional, historic, and disciplinary contexts informing the work.

Keywords:

• pedagogy
• architecture
• professional issues

Notes

Notes

1 Sheida Shahi, Mansour Esnaashary Esfahani, Chris Bachmann, and Carl Haas, “A Definition Framework for Building Adaptation Projects,” Sustainable Cities and Society 63 (2020): 102345; Bie Plevoets and Koenraad Van Cleempoel, “Adaptive Reuse as a Strategy Towards Conservation of Cultural Heritage: A Literature Review,” Structural Studies, Repairs and Maintenance of Heritage Architecture XII 118, no. 12 (2011): 155–163; Google Books Ngram viewer, As-built Drawings, accessed February 1, 2021, https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=As-built+drawings.

2 AIA Knowledge Resources Team, “Terminology: As-Built Drawings, Record Drawings, Measured Drawings,” AIA Best Practices – BP 10.10.04 (June 2007): 1–2.

3 AIA Knowledge Resources Team, “Terminology”: 1.

4 AIA Knowledge Resources Team, “Terminology”: 1.

5 American Institute of Architects, The Architect’s Handbook of Professional Practice, Fifteenth Edition (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2014), 1118.

6 American Institute of Architects, The Architect’s Handbook, 1134.

7 Joseph D. Balachowski, HABS Guidelines, Recording Historic Structures, and Sites with HABS Measured Drawings (Washington: U.S. Department of the Interior National Park Service, 2005), 1–105.

8 Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, Dictionnaire Raisonné De L’architecture Française Du Xie Au Xvie Siècle, 10 vols. (Paris: Morel and Bance, 1854-68).

9 Aron Vinegar, “Viollet-le-Duc, Panoramic Photography, and the Restoration of the Château de Pierrefonds,” in Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, ed. Werner Oechslin (Zürich: Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule-Geschichte und Theorie der Architektur Verlag/Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 2010): 90–109.

10 FACADES, Yossi Milo Gallery, accessed February 1, 2021, https://yossimilo.com/exhibitions/markus-brunetti-2015-09.

11 Markus Brunetti and David Campany, Markus Brunetti: Facades: Cathedrals, Churches, Cloisters in Europe (Germany: Markus Brunetti, 2016): 1–92.

12 LAOCOÖN FRAGMENTS, FACTUM arte, https://www.factum-arte.com/pag/785/laoco%C3%83%C2%B6n-fragments, accessed February 1, 2021.

13 V&A Physical description of collection holding, accessed February 1, 2021, http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O1326249/neues-museum-drawing-drawing-david-chipperfield-architects/.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Adam Modesitt

Adam Modesitt’s interests focus on adapting, hybridizing, and repositioning digital workflows to reengage architecture’s traditions and histories. He has taught previously at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. Prior to teaching full time, he was a project director at SHoP Architects, overseeing a broad range of projects, from the master plan of Konza City, Kenya, to a proposed redesign of LGA airport, to a million-square-foot cultural building in downtown Detroit. He was also a project manager of the Barclays Center Arena in Brooklyn, where he led the design and implementation of the building’s panelized facade. He has also held positions at Preston Scott Cohen Inc. in Cambridge, MA, and Foster + Partners in London. Modesitt holds a Bachelor of Arts in Physics from Wesleyan University and a Master of Architecture from Harvard University.

Carrie Norman

Carrie Norman is a cofounder of the New Orleans and Chicago-based design collaborative Norman Kelley. The practice’s professional and theoretical work reexamines architecture and design’s relationship to vision, prompting observers to see nuance in the familiar. Norman Kelley has contributed work to the 14th Venice Architecture Biennale (2014) and the inaugural Chicago Architecture Biennial (2015). The practice was a recipient of the Architecture League of New York Young Architect’s Prize (2014). The practice’s design work, which includes a collection of American Windsor chairs, is currently represented by Volume Gallery in Chicago. Norman received a Bachelor of Science in Architecture with Honors from the University of Virginia and a Master in Architecture from Princeton University. She is a licensed architect in the state of New York and previously worked as a senior architect with SHoP Architects in New York City. She has previously taught design studios and representation seminars at New Jersey Institute of Technology, Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Barnard College, and the University of Pennsylvania.