Title

Author(s)

Vsevolod Kondratiev-Popov

Affiliation

University of Reading

DOI

https://doi.org/10.65686/IHEH1762

Keywords

Secondness, Subjectivity, Ethico-aesthetic Paradigm

PP

525-531

How to Cite

Kondratiev-Popov, Vsevolod. “Seconded Subjectivity Design Agency in Reuse.” In Proceedings of the International Conference on Adaptive Reuse. Volume 1, edited by Andrea Crudeli, Francesca Molle, and Emanuele Carrai, 525–531. Firenze: STH Press, 2026.

Abstract

This paper theorises architectural subjectivity in adaptive reuse projects and opens opportunities for critical engagement with the ethics of design. Drawing on Felix Guattari’s ecosophy, it adapts James Nisbet’s concepts developed in Second Site (2021) from art criticism to architecture. These prove more useful for understanding the process of design within a historical and ecological continuum than the dichotomy between pre-existing and proposed. This terminology is redeployed to analyse and compare two projects: Leon Battista Alberti’s 15th-century renovation of San Francesco into the Tempio Malatestiano, and Carmody Groarke’s contemporary enclosure of Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s Hill House. In both cases, adaptive reuse produces a seconded experience. The revised building has a fundamentally altered relationship to its function, users, and context, through overlays and additions rather than erasures. Alberti’s envelope serves as both a literal and a metaphorical screen, concealing the Gothic church while subversively asserting the architect’s own disapproval of his patron. Nisbet’s concept of succession helps articulate this temporal layering as a critical design act that remains legible for us today. The Hill House Box, meanwhile, reframes both the building and its landscape. Once understood as a pioneering site-specific work, the house now appears as a vulnerable object under glass. This shift reverses how the site is occupied and how it is perceived – producing a seconded spatiality that foregrounds maintenance, climate, and access. The paper thus offers an interpretation of adaptive reuse as a process of architectural resubjectivisation: for architects, users, and buildings alike. It contributes to contemporary discourse by repositioning reuse as a generative site of ethico-aesthetic design agency.

Edited by
Andrea Crudeli
Francesca Molle
Emanuele Carrai

Publisher
STH Press, Firenze

ISBN Paperback – 9791281661141
ISBN Ebook – 9791281661158
DOI – https://doi.org/10.65686/SISY7263

Year
2026

Proceedings of
International Conference on Adaptive Reuse
hosted by The University of Pisa, Italy
15-19 September 2025, at the Gispoteca di Arte Antica dell’Università di Pisa.