[Tagging] Multiple purposes for buildings

[Martin Koppenhoefer]

2013/1/2 Simone Saviolo <simone.saviolo at gmail.com>:
> IMO, the question is conceptually wrong.


+1


> What you are trying to tag is the
> *use* of the building, and not a property of the building per se. Unless
> it's a mall, a retail store's interior is not structurally different from an
> office space or apartments - it could be converted, in fact.


well, true and not. Some structures are highly specific for certain
uses (e.g. a supermarket type of building, but also a hotel or an
office building) and you could hardly make (economic) sense of them
with a different usage, but this does not imply that a supermarket
(for example) has always to be located inside a dedicated supermarket
building (there are examples for instance in the center of Rome, where
supermarkets are inside old buildings (often several buildings later
unified at certain floor levels). In these cases the supermarket use
doesn't (IMHO) make a supermarket building out of the building. You
can (somehow) convert an office building into a hotel or vice versa,
but it will not result in an ideal solution (building axxis distances,
floor heights, vertical tubes for water etc.) according to current
state of the art, and the more adapted/specialized a building is to a
certain use the less easy it will be to transform it for another
usage.

Often older buildings will be torn down and re-built instead of
transformed (but this depends on lots of factors like local building
laws and culture, price of the land and price of the construction,
budget of the client, value and transformability of the existing
structure, intended use, etc.)

cheers,
Martin