Today about 50% of the overall US building industry, totaling $50 billion each year, is comprised of the transformation, adaptation or expansion of existing buildings. This journal addresses these issues of adaptive reuse by promoting creative explorations of this subject through exemplary works in which sustainability is one important facet. Its domain encompasses issues of preservation, conservation, alteration and interventions in the field of architecture and interior studies and practice, but also in the realms of urban and landscape design, and their repercussions in the history and theory of architecture, urbanism, art and design. This inaugural issue is a sampling of such explorations within these varied fields.

Int|AR is positioned within RISD’s Department of Interior Architecture, whose focus is adaptive reuse. In existence since 1947, it is founded upon the leadership of its first department head, Ernst Lichtblau, a student of Otto Wagner grounded in the sensibilities of the Viennese Secession.