Building adaptation or refurbishment

Due to the high sustainable awareness in UK, there is trends where many clients choose to refurbish their building instead of demolish compare to Malaysia. Refurbishment helps to upgrade the building performance to a higher standard in order to increase the lifetime of the building.

Before this, refurbishment was my decision and I had decided to refurbish some parts of the building instead of demolish. After this lesson, I felt that my decision is right and workable as refurbishment considered into the sustainable and conservation aspects.

Refurbishment should be encouraged to practice as it brings many benefits than the demolition especially for historical building. However, the decision still need depend on the condition of building. If there are many defects arising in the existing building and it requires higher cost to carry out refurbishment than the demolition, so it is not suitable to refurbish the building. Therefore, a condition survey of the existing building should be taken into account before making decisions.

Through this lesson, it greatly improved my knowledge on the factors to be considered before making decision of refurbishment.