In 1965, the Urban Improvement Corporation (CORMU) was established in Chile. The Corporation led major development projects, most notably the San Borja Remodelling. Framed by the demolition of the San Borja Hospital, this project comprised a high-rise residential complex promoted as a symbol of progress. Celebrated as a model of modern planning, it received the 1970 National Housing Award for its acclaimed realisation of the principles of the Athens Charter (1933). Within this broader urban transformation, a former English nun’s colonial boarding school —later the 900 Cloister— was adapted to serve as CORMU’s headquarters. Lauded in architectural journals as an exemplary intervention in a heritage context, the project anticipated emerging heritage debates reflected in the 1977 and 1983 National Architecture Biennials. This paper analyses this case study to explore how “improvement,” modernisation and urban change shaped evolving understandings of architectural heritage theory and practice in Chile.

Threats of demolition increasingly place ordinary buildings at the center of public conflict, revealing how heritage value is formed not only through official designation but through social relations, lived experience, and collective action. This paper examines how moments of demolition crisis transform buildings into relational heritage spaces, where communities mobilize memory, identity, and belonging to challenge expert-driven and economic regimes of valuation. Drawing on contested demolition cases in Québec (Canada), the paper argues that such conflicts function as moments of accelerated heritage-making, in which social value becomes visible, articulated, and actionable. The concept of heritage re-cognition is proposed to describe this process: a re-knowing of heritage that emerges through attachment, resistance, and negotiation rather than recognition. By foregrounding heritage as a social relation, the paper shows how community mobilization can slow or halt demolition and open pathways toward adaptive reuse, contributing to debates on participation, legitimacy, and relational heritage practice.

This article engages with debates on heritage and sustainable futures by arguing that heritage becomes sustainable only when it renegotiates its relationship with the state and reframes publicness. While state-led heritagization brings entities into the public realm, it often constrains the participation of heterogeneous social life. Drawing on the rise of private old-house renovation in Taiwan over the past three decades, the article examines how publicness may be reconfigured beyond state-centered heritage. It traces the limits of preservation movements since the 1990s under the primacy of private property rights and shows how, after the 2000s, intellectuals promoted adaptive reuse as an alternative to formal designation. Focusing on Changhua, the article analyzes emerging modes of renovation governance and funding, and concludes by identifying a growing sense of custodianship through which private buildings become open not only to society but also to future generations.

This research on the architectural design intentions for a lunatic asylum in Dublin, and the subsequent changes wrought to the buildings, leads to an understanding of the role institutions play in society, creating and mediating social relations. The relationship of built heritage to society is explored through the evidence from the archives and the built environment, for the provision and withholding of welfare and comfort. Though institutions often hold painful memories of coercion and incarceration, is the surviving built environment to blame, or can it be remembered (and forgotten) and reused as a material resource?