CHI-L explores the relationship between inherited cultural values and contemporary society. By combining reflection, artistic inquiry, critical essays, and applied R&D projects, we seek to understand how cultural, social, and material dimensions of heritage interact, and how this understanding can be translated into meaningful approaches for the transformation and reuse of existing buildings.
Key Points of Our Activities
- Explore inheritance as a cultural process through which values are formed, negotiated, and transformed within contemporary society, and examine how these processes become manifest in - and interact with - the built environment.
- Develop integrated approaches that combine artistic inquiry, critical reflection, and applied R&D, linking narrative and socio-cultural values with technical, ecological, and functional performance criteria.
- Support owners, communities, and public bodies in shaping sustainable transformation and reuse strategies that align cultural meaning, societal relevance, regulatory frameworks, and the long-term performance of the existing building stock.
How we work
CHI-L operates through an integrated cycle of reflection and practice. Artistic work functions as an epistemic and discursive medium: it makes questions of value, continuity, and change tangible and opens spaces for engagement within wider socio-cultural debates. Critical essays provide conceptual depth, situate these questions within broader cultural and societal contexts, and support dialogue across disciplines.
Applied R&D projects translate these insights into tools for communication, evaluation, and collaboration, and into concrete transformation processes. This includes socio-cultural assessment of existing buildings and the development of transformation concepts tailored to specific ownership, regulatory, and community contexts. Central to this approach is the integration of narrative values with technical performance values, ensuring that cultural meaning and societal relevance are considered alongside material, ecological, and functional criteria.
In this way, CHI-L connects critical discourse with practical action, supporting transformation processes that are both culturally grounded and technically robust.