Can Designers Find New Beauty in Circularity?

METROPOLIS’s July/August 2023 issue looks at the many benefits of circular, regenerative design—including new forms of pleasure and delight.

By: Avinash Rajagopal

In the first seven months after its opening, Bonnet Springs Park in Lakeland, Florida, welcomed a million visitors. Just a few years prior to that, it was an abandoned site with 300,000 cubic yards of arsenic-contaminated soil. Knowing that the lush hills, bodies of water, play structures, and wetlands so painstakingly shaped and nurtured by the team at Sasaki were once an unloved postindustrial landscape makes them even more enjoyable—there is a sense of salvation there, and pride in the accomplishments of human persistence. 

This is just one of the many kinds of beauty to be found in designs for a circular, regenerative future. 

Detroit has an extraordinary concentration of abandoned buildings being converted for 21st-century purposes. “The ways in which adaptive reuse can become a core component of our quickly changing built world—and make buildings flexible enough to adapt to today’s needs and those of the future—are playing out here in real time,” writes Metropolis editor at large Sam Lubell. His reporting points out the many challenges in adapting all kinds of floor plates, footprints, and column grids for contemporary use, but also the unique opportunity to prepare these buildings for unforeseen future uses. That is another kind of beauty in the best adaptive reuse projects—the hidden joys of flexible design details, dormant until the next architect or designer tasked with preparing the building for a new use discovers them.