Degrees Of Physical Adaptation: Current Uses OfHistoric Naval Building Types

Abstract

Historic naval buildings in dockyards across Europe, now redundant for defence purposes, present particular opportunities and challenges to appropriate reuse. Their specialised shapes and dimensions are important factors to what futures they can expect, as are location, funding policy, the surrounding land uses and the historic value placed on them. Adaptation proposals also need to be measured against various conservation criteria and degrees of intervention. In this paper the outcomes of the interaction between cultural and physical constraints on reuse of generic dockyard building types in different European countries are examined. Their varying fortunes are set out according to their history, characteristics and degrees of permissable adaptation. Roperies, storehouses, sail lofts, boathouses, covered slips and wet docks, dry docks and basins are considered. There are of course difficulties of comparing like with like, buildings of different dates and dimensions, but analysis of adaptation of these typical dockyard types offers some general lessons and examples of different countries' responses to the challenge. In Venice Arsenale, some important monuments have been restored for their own sake, reflecting local political culture, although many others await creative reuse. In Sweden historic naval monuments are excellently restored and kept in good condition, whether they have a current use or not, while Skeppsholmen in Stockholm and Karlskrona offer exemplary reuses of whole historic naval sites. In the UK navy buildings have usually been treated as utilitarian structures, to be radically altered to new uses, left empty or demolished. The advent of conservation in the 1970s perhaps prevented further demolition. Low key uses of storehouses, for example for archives, may mean minimum intervention, while intensive human use exposes them to the full rigour of modern building and safety legislation. A high degree of design skill is needed to conserve robust original structure in combination with clarity of insertions for new services and uses. Transactions on the Built Environment vol 55, © 2001 WIT Press, www.witpress.com, ISSN 1743-3509