Ongoing Research, Canada
existing potential: adaptive reuse and retrofits
Unlocking building value through sustainable reuse
Summary of findings
Adaptive reuse, transformation, retrofits, renovations, and other approaches to reusing our existing buildings and infrastructure are essential strategies to decarbonizing our built environment. Various studies estimate that construction and demolition waste account for a staggering 40% of today’s landfills, and experts estimate that Ontario will exceed landfill capacity by 2032. Buildings are also currently responsible for 39% of global energy related carbon emissions.
It has become widely recognized that demolition has harmful impacts, meanwhile reuse offers numerous environmental, social, and economic benefits. This is resulting in demolition and reuse policy internationally; for many municipalities in the UK, pre-demolition audits are recommended as part of development applications, encouraging building owners to reuse buildings, infrastructure, materials, and landscapes.
City of London, London Plan Guidance, Circular Economy Statements, 2022
Retrofit and Reuse Policy in Canada
As heritage architect Catherine Nasmith has noted, “Unless a building has heritage status, (less than 1 per cent do) you can obtain a demolition permit over the counter on demand anywhere in the country. The right to demolish is rooted in outmoded planned obsolescence practices that originated in the post-war building boom. A right to demolish has no place in the era of climate change. Conservation of all resources is critical to survival.”
It is anticipated that reuse policy will soon exist in Canada. For example, in 2024 City of Toronto published an Embodied Carbon Management Toolkit developed jointly by Mantle Developments and Ha/f Climate Design, with funding provided by The Atmospheric Fund. Within this document, the Circular Construction section makes recommendations for encouraging reuse, such as through pre-demolition audits.
Additionally, Giaimo with Ha/f Climate Design and WSP are the lead consultants for CAHP’s Existing Buildings, Carbon, and Code Analysis project funded by the Government of Canada’s Code Accelerator Fund. Started in 2025, this project will undertake LCA and energy modeling comparative analysis of 3 building approaches: adaptive reuse, reuse with an addition, and demolition with new construction, to better understand best practices in reuse and help shape future national retrofit codes.
Existing Potential at Toronto Metropolitan University
In 2023, 2024, and 2025, Joey Giaimo and Julia Jamrozik co-led a graduate design studio at TMU called Existing Potential. Rather than starting from a blank slate (tabula rasa), the graduate design studio asked students to critically consider and take a position towards the existing. The studio demonstrates a pursuit of adaptive opportunities considering a tabula plena approach. For their semester’s work each student chose a site at the scale of a building, block or neighborhood. The sites chosen were both Canadian and international, and ranged from grain silos in Saskatchewan to Seoul’s ceremonial Gwanghwamun Square.
Over the last seven years, Joey Giaimo has been an instructor at TMU’s Department of Architectural Science, leading courses and studios on heritage conservation and adaptive reuse. From The Architecture Building Must Die, to The Resilient Library, these courses ask students: When considering the social and cultural value of places, and given our climate crisis, how do we better leverage our existing infrastructure that may be considered inadequate? From exploring disuse and regeneration through the narrative of changing contexts, can we employ design frameworks that prevent instances where buildings are neglected, abandoned, and demolished?
Program Test Fit Study exploring the adaptive reuse of Davisville Public School.
Intensification within Residential Buildings
Existing buildings play an important role in the housing crisis. Whether through adding new units to apartments, proper maintenance and care of our existing housing stock, or converting old office towers to residential, adaptive reuse allows for creating more housing without the long delays and process typical with new construction.
Giaimo has worked with a range of developers to upgrade existing residential assets, such as at 5600 Sheppard where we transformed abandoned squash courts into new community amenities. Through feasibility studies and facility planning, we work closely with property owners to explore how their existing sites and assets can have added residential units and expanded value through intensification, supporting sustainable community development.
Before and after amenity space, 5600 Sheppard
The Hermant Building Transformation
Unlocking the Potential of Commercial Assets
While there is limited policy encouraging building reuse in Canada at the moment, design solutions do already exist and can be implemented in projects today. As architects and heritage consultants, Giaimo specializes in working with all types of existing buildings, helping clients and building owners unlock the environmental and financial potential of their assets, bringing new life and beauty to dated and derelict spaces. With rising new construction costs across Canada, reusing existing buildings offers risk management and financial benefits. Through adaptive reuse and retrofits, we also help clients meet their ESG goals.
For example, for The Hermant Building Transformtion, the project scope called for replacement of all existng windows, assuming that given their poor condition this would lead to improved energy efficieny and save costs. However, Giaimo proposed undertaking a thorough condition assessment of all windows, and found that restoration was possible for a majority of the windows, would be slightly more affordable than new windows, and would have substantial embodied carbon savings from a whole life carbon perspective.
Understanding the Challenges of Reuse
Reuse does present a number of challenges compared to new construction, and thus requires expertise in existing buildings. Giaimo has extensive experience working on over a hundred existing buildings across Canada, from adaptive reuse feasibility studies for municipalities and public sector clients to transforming derelict spaces into new community amenities for private developers.
Giaimo’s thought-leadership in this area has been presented at conferences across Canada, including:
Preserving the Past While Building for the Future, Retrofit Canada Conference, Toronto, June 2025.
Doing Less: Scales of Reuse, AZURE Human/Nature Conference, Toronto, October 2024.
Redevelopment and Reuse Council, Urban Land Institute (ULI) 2023 Spring Meeting, Toronto.
