“But if all you can see is this frozen façade, that's the period that you're choosing to keep the public appearance of the building as, which doesn't really create any meaningful dialogue between the old and the new.”

Facadism or facadism practices, as Clemency Gibbs refers to them, stand for “privileging of the façade above other aspects of the building, within the context of development.” There is an intriguing conservation practice where entire buildings are gutted for (re)development but their facades are kept intact to retain a certain architectural character at the scale of the street, the neighborhood or even the city.

Clemency is a PhD researcher in Architectural & Urban History & Theory at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, and has degrees in both Classics and Cultural Heritage. She previously worked as a heritage consultant and as a researcher at Foster + Partners. She is currently an early-stage researcher at UN-Habitat’s MetroHub.

Link to Clemency’s work: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/architecture/clemency-gibbs