saving heritage buildings

Two issues in Melbourne this week - the Myer Emporium project and the Windsor Hotel project - are relevant to a discussion of adaptive re-use of existing, heritage listed (or not) buildings. The Windsor Hotel proposal looks to be a well thought out project that will inject new life into a tired but cherished building. The Windsor is first and foremost a hotel and this proposal will ensure that it will remain so, albeit in a contemporary form. Necessarily the scale of the new component will be larger than the existing building but then, when the Windsor was built, it no doubt overpowered its neighbours. And the city has grown in scale across the board also since then. The architectural detail and form of the new components are such that they will be readily discernible from the old. Remember the Burra Charter? A good outcome. On the other hand the demolition of the art-deco facaded Lonsdale street building next to Myer's to widen Caledonian Lane for service access seems crude and poorly considered. All the program requirements for the project could possibly have been met and this building incorporated in the project if the will was there. But the writing (literally) was on the wall as this building has been allowed to deteriorate over recent times. It was never to be part of Myer's 'grand plan' it seems.
So in the one week, we have two textbook cases of how to respect and re-use heritage buildings - one appropriate and one less so.