Study Architecture 
ProPEL 
Author(s): Fleet Hower
Cities across upstate New York are facing a crisis of deteriorating, under-resourced building stock and challenges in providing basic services for recently arrived immigrants. In Albany, New York, the demolition of buildings has increasingly been used as a method of reducing what the city deems to be unsafe properties, leading to the destruction of culturally and architecturally important structures and causing the irretrievable loss of embodied carbon expenditures. Even a “new, green, energy-efficient office building that includes as much as 40 percent recycled materials would nevertheless take approximately 65 years to recover the energy lost in demolishing a comparable existing building.”1 A growing problem since the 2008 financial crisis, there are now nearly 1,000 abandoned buildings in Albany.2 Albany is experiencing an influx of migrants, many of whom arrived via New York City, and is struggling to provide them necessary services.3 Students approached these challenges through a process of community partnership and technical analysis4 to develop proposals for the revitalization of Guild House, a property owned by the adjacent non-profit Cathedral of All Saints, that has been abandoned for over 40 years.
https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.AM.113.91
Volume Editors
Sara Jensen Carr & Rubén García Rubio
ISBN
978-1-944214-48-7
