This article was originally published by Metropolis Magazine as "'Hardcore Heritage': RAAAF Reveals Its Latest Experiment in Historical Preservation."

Rendering of Deltawerk 1:1. Image Courtesy of RAAAF | Atelier de Lyon

This article was originally published by Metropolis Magazine as "'Hardcore Heritage': RAAAF Reveals Its Latest Experiment in Historical Preservation."In the practice of historic preservation, there is often a temptation to turn a building into an object on display?meticulously restored, unchanging, physically isolated?in order to remove it from the flow of history. The multidisciplinary Amsterdam-based studio Rietveld-Architecture-Art-Affordances (RAAAF) situates itself in opposition to this method of dealing with architectural remnants. Instead, it proposes to make history tangible by altering these decaying structures in a way that makes their stories plainly visible. The practice has a name for this approach?"hardcore heritage."Founded and led by brothers Ronald and Erik Rietveld, RAAAF has completed several projects that together form a kind of built manifesto for hardcore heritage, with the next iteration due out in 2018. The procedure changes with each project?there are excavations, but also deletions?but in every case, the end result charges them with a new special significance. In Ronald?s words, the works are ?about the spatial experience that triggers imagination.?The first stirrings came in...