St. John’s Hospital in Bruges, Belgium has been remade as a cultural center including a spectacular museum of Picasso’s sketches.

Traditional Building Magazine asked me to retool my blog on the reuse of the 800 year old hospital I visited in Bruges, Belgium.  The result is the “Culture of Reuse” which was published this month as an editorial on their Forum page.

To requote myself (!):

Are Americans so quick to abandon and demolish because we have so much? Do places like Bruges reuse and save without thinking about it because it is in their cultural DNA or because access to landfills is more difficult? If landfills charged more here, charged what the real cost of demolition is to our planet, no one would be so quick to suggest that it is easier and less expensive to demolish than reuse.

If Belgium can remake an 800-year-old European hospital, why can’t we save one that is only 100 years old!?

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