AIR Initiative

Who we are:

As our name suggests, AIR Initiative recognises the pressing issues facing the architectural industry, and highlights the potential we see in the buidlings that already exist. We don't want to sit as passive contributors in a failing industry.

We are an architectural development practice working with buildings at the end of their life in defence of the planet, engagement of the occupants and interest of investors.

AIR Initiative puts focus on structures that have been abandoned or partially lost. Places often seen as obsolete, risky, or economically unviable. Rather than demolishing and replacing them, we treat these buildings as valuable spatial and material resources, and intriguing story tellers.

Our work inserts light, reversible architectural systems into existing shells, allowing new forms of inhabitation while preserving the embodied carbon, memory, and character already present.

Our core principles focus on place, past and purpose.

We take a place that with a factor of intrigue.
We honour its past.
We have a purpose to protect the planet in the interest of investors and occupants

Why we do it:

The climate crisis is putting unprecedented pressure on our industry to change, and yet largely it remains unchanged as a check box exercise. Speed, novelty, and cost remain the real drivers homogenising the built environment and pushing sustainable practice to the background. We try and level this playing field.

Putting sustainability first with a naturally cost effective solution that brings engaging spatial qualities on strict timelines.

How we do it:

The least carbon intensive thing to do would be not to build at all. But this isn't an option, so what is the next closest? Making the shells of buildings past their life inhabitable by the most basic measures.

We take these buildings and revive them with the lightest possible intervention of sliding a low-carbon frame inside the old shell creating a double skin.

Its an approach that prioritises minimal wast, minimal demolition, and maximum respect for what exists.

As the shell continues to decay, the architecture of insertion is further revealed and becomes more celebrated. Not as an egotistical monument, but an adaptable, repairable, rearrangeable system that flexes with time.

As the ruins shift, so can the architecture within it. Layered time becomes a design strategy, not an accident.

Page updated

Google Sites

Report abuse