The Dated and the Desirable : A Real Estate Period Drama

Poor post-war mid-century modernist buildings. Always the wrecking ball, never the retrofit brush. Labelled by architects as dated, developers as unviable and planners as expendable, they occupy an awkward tier: not old enough to be revered as heritage, but not new enough to be marketed as fashionable.

So, if you happen to be a 1960s building hoping to bathe in the sunshine of retrofit-first, think again. It turns out saving your carbon may not save your skin.

But what if what is condemned as unfashionable is simply being assessed at the wrong point in the taste cycle? Is an ephemeral, taste-based judgement leading to an irreversible development decision? The problem for property is unusually acute: the aesthetic judgement is being made at one point in time, whilst the asset has to perform across several points in time.

What is fashionable today will be cringe tomorrow, and vice versa. But that instability needn't only represent development risk. Developers can exploit the instability of taste as a positioning opportunity.

If development decisions have longer consequences than the aesthetic cycles informing them, perhaps the objective shouldn't be to make an asset fashionable. It should be to make it distinctive enough to survive fashion.

What if the elements that the current taste paradigm relegates as undesirable are themselves sources of differentiation? A naff 1960s curtain wall may well stand out in a sea of homogenous developments congealing around the same specifications, the same amenities and the same architectural language. What if each asset were assessed on those terms, rather than against the specifications of its new-build counterparts?

It is too easy to recognise this potential in seminal architectural masterpieces that have already been canonised or listed: The Southbank Centre, the Barbican, Centre Point, Space House. But what about the myriad other buildings we disparage as second-tier?

Take the St Martins Lane Hotel for example: I can imagine the design and access statement if it were to be repositioned today: a generic 1960s building whose erasure offered an opportunity for best-in-class office space and a contemporary building that better responds to its urban context. Thankfully, Ian Schrager had other plans. In 1998, he and Philippe Starck worked with the framework of the existing architecture to create a destination hotel, culturally re-coding what might have been dismissed as a liability into an object of desire - and helping set the template for the boutique hotel globally.

The same phenomenon can be found in commercial property.

Over 25 years of repositioning and redevelopment, Oliver's Yard has become a laboratory of the taste cycle. When Derwent London (then Derwent Valley) acquired the early-1960s Companies House in 1995, it was a London-stock post-war office building with “no obvious star quality”, even described by one of its own directors as “architecturally lousy” (Derwent Valley DV03, Autumn 2004). Yet, the developer recognised that its large floorplates and generous slab-to-slab heights intimated another kind of value, beyond the aesthetic appraisal of the time. ORMS radically reconfigured it; when the dot-com market subsequently collapsed, the design and marketing team repositioned it again for a different tenant profile.

Two decades later, the irony is difficult to miss. The latest refurbishment by Carmody Groarke seeks to reveal more of the building's original mid-century character. What was once described as "architecturally lousy" has survived long enough to become character, and a source of market differentiation.

Not far from it, at The Bower, Helical plc began with a collection of underperforming 1960s buildings that had themselves been subjected to an earlier taste cycle, having already suffered the indignity of being overclad in the 1980s. Rather than treating the existing architecture uniformly as either sacred or expendable, the redevelopment by AHMM was selective: original concrete panels and columns were retained and exposed at the Warehouse, while the Tower was stripped back to its structure, extended and substantially reinvented in an architectural language congruent with the original. The result wasn't preservation for preservation's sake, nor wholesale erasure, but a new proposition that derived its character from a selective interpretation of what was already there.

Together, these examples expose the limitations of treating redevelopment as a binary choice: either an asset is an inimitable masterpiece worthy of preservation, or it is an expendable piece of rubbish, perhaps worth salvaging only for its structural frame. The spectrum of intervention is far richer, more tailored, more imaginative and potentially far more differentiated.

In each case, the point is not simply that an old building was successfully refurbished. Inherited difference became an ingredient in a desirable contemporary proposition. What once counted against the asset became part of what gave it character.

So the question isn't whether a so-called dated building should be retained or replaced. It's which of its characteristics should be retained, amplified, suppressed, reinterpreted or replaced in order to create the strongest proposition.

This isn't retrofit first. It's proposition first.

Perhaps too many developers surrender strategic agency when they treat prevailing taste as an immutable market condition. After all, the market belongs to those who define it, not those who chase it.