Design management: Challenges for adaptive re-use

Adaptive re-use is an important strategy in overcoming the problem of dilapidated and redundant historical buildings. It is a significant strategy for achieving sustainability as it ensures a continuous building life cycle and prevents building destruction. Adaptive reuse projects have their own unique environment and specific challenges to ensure success. As building stock ages, more and more attention is focus on adaptive re-use projects. The aim of this paper is to explore the unique problems and critical success factors in the design brief development phase for heritage buildings. The literature review has identified incomplete information on historical buildings, lack of creativity and flexibility and lack of collaboration among project stakeholders as a unique problem. Specifically an architect with specific expertise to provide the necessary creativity in design problem solving, stakeholders who will collaborate during design decision-making processes and quality information to support problem solving are among the critical success factors for these projects. It is a highly specialised field with significant experience and knowledge domains that accumulated from past projects. Such knowledge and expertise often create intellectual capital within project teams. These teams comprises of professionals in a niche market who typically work together on subsequent projects, which makes it as important as to understand reflexive modes of management. Two projects of the same project teams are examine as case studies to explore the relevance of the concept of reflexivity.