Care as Design Strategy. Adaptive Reuse as a Curatorial Practice

In the current contemporary polycrisis context, marked by urgent ecological, social, and political issues, the adaptive reuse of the built heritage emerges as a central architectural practice in the transition toward more sustainable and responsible relationships with urban environments. This contribution proposes a reflection on the interpretation of reuse as a form of care: a design paradigm that entails a complex approach to the existing, not solely technical or conservative, but also critical, interpretative, and forward-looking. Care, understood in a sense close to curatorship, involves an act of listening and the recognition of the latent qualities of the existing, oriented toward a future vision. From this perspective, the unused or transitional built heritage within urban contexts is interpreted as a “valueladen complex”: a cultural and social infrastructure, layered in its material, spatial, symbolic, and functional meanings, which is activated only through a projective gaze capable of listening and rewriting. This leads to a redefinition of heritage value—not based on formal or monumental integrity, but on its potential for activation, on its incomplete, open, and adaptable nature. In this sense, Adaptive reuse design strategies are thus a meaning-making device, a space of negotiation between permanence and transformation, between matter and memory, and a fertile ground for design creativity. This theoretical framework is articulated through the analysis of exemplary case studies, such as Sala Beckett by Flores & Prats and Atelier Kempe Thill interventions on Wintercircus in Ghent, in which architectural design engages with the existing as a living matter to be critically re-read. Adaptive reuse thus emerges as a strategic design tool to responsibly address some of the challenges of the contemporary city, contributing to a renewed relationship between project and heritage, between past and future.