Research On Commercial Reuse Of Historic Buildings In Auckland From The Perspective Of The Experience Economy

Reusing historic buildings is a growing practice done for cultural,economic,environmental and sustainable reasons.Reusable historic buildings,whether the symbols of history or places of sensation,have abundant values and potential to provide genuine experience.The widespread experience economy has affected consumption demand,while the experience has become one of the factors that influences the reuse of historic buildings in which architects balance conservation of authentic materiality and creative strategies to satisfy customer experience.The purpose of this study is to understand the impact of the experience economy on the reuse of historic buildings.Authenticity is the center of discussion for its important role in the conservation and reuse of historic buildings.This thesis established an post-evaluation method for the commercial reuse of historic buildings from discussion of authenticity in architectural heritage and heritage tourism,to evaluate the objective,symbolic and experiential values of historic buildings.Auckland,New Zealand,is chosen as the research area because of its rich historic buildings and profound conservation policies.In addition,this thesis mainly used case study method to test the evaluation method,in which four major and twenty secondary cases were selected.Findings indicated that there were three kinds of reuse strategies and were named as Dialogue,Deflection and Staging according to the relationship between people and the building.Concerning the objective values of the historic buildings’ materiality,Dialogue privileged sensitive conservation/transformation,Deflection emphasized creative transformation,and Staging focused on creative conservation.In terms of symbolic values,Dialogue preserved old values while Deflection provided new cultural values,and Staging emphasized both of them.As for experiential values,Dialogue built affective experience and Deflection concentrated on thematized experience,whereas Staging emphasized affectively thematized experience.In addition,the analysis of Auckland cases had a certain effect on the reuse practice of commercial historic buildings in China,which is shown as follows: 1)pay attention to the connection between buildings;2)emphasize the sense of existence of historic buildings;3)maintain the dialogue between people and historic buildings;4)consider the creation of themed experience.The establishment and application of the evaluation method after the transformation provided a method to analyze the reuse strategy of historic buildings from the perspective of experience economy.