Who We Are
The Center for Preservation and Adaptive Reuse (CPAR) produces innovative research, advances knowledge, and promotes educational initiatives addressing the sustainable reuse and preservation of the existing built environment. Recognizing its critical contribution to our sustainable future. We are an interdisciplinary group of educators, architects, planners, landscape architects, historians, anthropologists, museum specialists, engineers, materials scientists, and builders who are connected to, and collaborating with, a larger group of professionals and organizations to achieve our mission. Our work focuses on increasing awareness of the historical, social, cultural and environmental value of our built environment through research, documentation and analysis, planning, education and advocacy. The Center for Preservation and Adaptive Reuse was initiated in 2017 in the College of Built Environments (CBE) at the University of Washington, building on the college’s longstanding commitment embodied in the Certificate Program in Historic Preservation that dates to the 1980s.
Research, Education and Advocacy
The Center for Preservation and Adaptive Reuse (CPAR) engages in a wide variety of projects in research, planning, advocacy and education to support our mission statement to foster preservation and adaptive reuse of our built environment. CPAR and the College of Built Environment has the goal of engaging more students of all disciplines in the many opportunities in preservation, sustainability and adaptive reuse. We are currently enlarging our curriculum offerings to include cross-disciplinary courses to support a new CBE Graduate Certificate Program in Historic Preservation that will be available university wide. This educational initiative will also bring together a wider range of faculty expertise and to broaden and diversify opportunities for students across the UW.
Why Preservation and Adaptive Reuse?
Buildings, one of the largest and most expensive products of human action, hold cultural, social, historical, and environmental value. They play a dominant role in our lives as a critical part of our human experience, providing shelter, workspaces, rest areas, and leisure spots, while influencing us through their style, form, color, materials, and space. As embodiments of our pluralistic society’s historical narratives, buildings help us understand our past heritage and connect us to our present communities.
Their impact on the environment is significant. In the United States, buildings are responsible for 76% of all electricity consumption, 41% of primary energy use, 48% of carbon (CO2) emissions, 60% of raw material use, and 13% of potable water consumption. Some of the most severe impacts occur when a building is destroyed. Of the 275 billion square feet of existing buildings in the United States today, nearly 2 billion square feet are demolished annually, with an estimated 40% of demolition waste ending up in landfills. Therefore, preservation and adaptive reuse must be part of any possible strategy for sustainability.