Reviving Buildings: Methods and Praxis for Adaptive Reuse and Resilient Retrofit

A Level 9 micro-credential at the Cork Centre for Architectural Education. Twelve weeks, blended, built around one existing building that you choose and carry the whole way through.

Code

AT6031

Award

NFQ Level 9, 5 ECTS12 weeks, part-time

Starts

Wednesday 25 November 2026module runs to 3 March 2027

Live sessions

Wednesdays 13:00 to 14:00eight lunchtime lectures, 25 November to 3 February, all recorded

Seminars

11 two-hour webinarsreleased as evening on-demand recordings

Own time

90 hoursonline, any time

Fee

EUR 500EUR 100 with the 80 per cent HEA subsidy

Applications close

Monday 2 November 2026

RIAI CPD

Up to 30 pointsone per hour of session time

Taught by

Maroun TabbalCCAE, University College Cork

What the module is for

The module goal, as University College Cork publishes it.

To increase knowledge and evaluate environmental performance and aesthetic values of existing buildings; to critique and understand issues around sustainability (re-use and circularity, decarbonisation, energy use and performance/behaviour etc.) associated with repurposing existing building stock in order to create a more resilient built environment: to enhance abilities to recognise and design for potential new uses of existing buildings; to create familiarisation with different practical and/or novel methods and approaches to achieving sustainable results in building retrofits; to create awareness of new knowledge and instill an ability to effectively communicate advanced concepts to other parties including academic, public, legislative, community, professional networks.

Module content

The role of embodied energy in the fabric of existing buildings. The design of energy upgrades having regard for the need to maintain a building's existing value to society, with a focus on the environmental and economic benefits of the upgrade. The impact of selecting a renewable energy system for an existing building, and the aesthetic and material effect that selection has on the appearance of the building.

Case studies and exemplar live projects carry the teaching. Through them the module conceptualises the values held in existing buildings, which are historic, aesthetic, environmental, social and community, while focusing on repurposing and resilient retrofitting. It explores leading and novel research on thermal efficiency in existing buildings, and looks at effective solutions for current and future decarbonisation using materials and techniques appropriate to an existing building.

Universal Design runs through all of it. The module works from the concepts and the relevant guidelines towards overcoming the barriers to Universal Design that existing buildings put in the way.

What you will be able to do

The six learning outcomes, in the module descriptor's own words.

1. Demonstrate an ability to analyse an example of the renovation of an existing building to achieve an environmental performance significantly closer to the standards expected in contemporary construction.
2. Identify potential problems or advantages encountered if modern materials and construction techniques have been used in buildings constructed with traditional materials and construction techniques.
3. Demonstrate a critical ability in prioritising strategic approaches to the re-purposing and energy upgrading of an existing building.
4. Demonstrate an awareness of the need for sensitivity in dealing with older buildings that may have historical, cultural and/or social significance to the local or national community.
5. Explain how the concepts of universal design and relevant guidelines should influence the refurbishment of existing buildings in order to achieve greater resilience.
6. Demonstrate an ability to effectively communicate the technical/social value of repurposing and resilient retrofitting.

The one idea the module turns on

A building that is already standing has already spent its embodied energy. Every decision you take on it trades energy that is already spent against energy still to be spent, and the trade runs through fabric, systems, use and the values people hold in the thing. Name that trade and you can defend a proposal. Skip it and you have made the trade anyway, without knowing it.

That claim has a lineage and the module teaches it as one. Stewart Brand framed buildings as layered systems that change over time, which is the conceptual ground for adaptive reuse. Thirty years later SEAI carries the current policy position, that adaptive reuse and deep retrofit are the default for the existing stock, in a report the module takes its own name from. Beside it runs a second pair: Odum formalised emergy as the embodied solar energy behind any product, and Kiel Moe carried that accounting into architecture, reading a building as the energy and matter it takes to assemble and to run.

The nine-square frame sets both lineages out with the definitions, the recipe, the tools and the cases, and it names the one cell nobody has filled yet.

How the module runs

Blended. Two live-and-recorded strands and a large block of your own time.

Wednesdays 13:00 to 14:00

The lunchtime lecture Eight of them, from 25 November to 3 February. This hour is shared with AT6012 and AT6020, and invited guests are hosted here.

Evenings, weekly

The seminar Eleven two-hour seminars and webinars, released as on-demand recordings so you take them when the week allows.

Any time

Your own 90 hours The survey, the accounts, the model and the case file on your building.

The twelve weeks

Eight weeks carrying a live lecture, a Christmas break, then four weeks that run on the seminars and your own work.

The eight lunchtime lectures fall on 25 November, 2, 9 and 16 December, then 13, 20 and 27 January and 3 February. Three Wednesdays over Christmas carry no live session. The module continues past the last lecture on the seminars, the asynchronous material and the case file, and closes on 3 March 2027.

Open the full programme, week by week, with the seminar releases and the dates that are still to be confirmed named as such.

How you are assessed

Continuous assessment, as published in the module descriptor.

This course is fully assessed through continuous assessment.

The work builds as a case file on one existing building. You choose it in the first week and every instrument the module hands you adds a layer: the survey, the embodied energy account, the values reading, the upgrade strategy, the systems selection, the Universal Design audit. The final layer is the argument the case file lets you make, addressed to an audience you name.

Where the module came from

AT6031 started as a room. Reviving Buildings ran first as a CPD series at CCAE, Douglas Street, in LR2, from 27 February to 7 May 2024, for the lecturers in the six Irish schools of architecture that make up the Building Change project. The brief then was to upskill the people who were about to redesign their own curricula for climate, and the CPD programme was built from modules and research contributed by each of the six partner institutions. TU Dublin delivered the first in January 2023, UCD the second that September, and CCAE delivered this one.

What was anticipated then has happened: the CPD became attractive to practising architects. This module is that series carried into a Level 9 award, delivered online so the room is no longer the limit, and opened to anyone who meets the entry requirements. The subject matter is the same and the audience is wider.

What the module runs on

Live instruments and live surfaces. You work on these and your findings go back into them.

• AECO2 BIM Canvas, actors, stocks and flows on the 4D canvas, which is where a building becomes a model you can argue with.
• Digital Twin and Sensing, the model beside the instrument, for the part of performance that only measurement settles.
• Wellbeing and Occupancy, what the building does to the people in it, which is the half of performance an energy model leaves out.
• Emergy Explorer, Odum's ecological energy accounting, and the route into the embodied energy account.
• The bibliography and the citation pairs, where every claim the module makes carries a seminal source beside a current one.
• Solving for Zero, the participatory action research course running alongside this one.

What you need to bring

An architecture or engineering bachelor's degree or a related equivalent qualification, with proficiency in English, and at least one year working in a relevant professional or management role. Without a bachelor's degree, UCC suggests a minimum of five years' leadership or management experience. Beyond the paperwork, an interest in becoming climate literate, in uncovering new architecture solutions, and in helping achieve net zero buildings with Universal Access.

Bring a building, too. The module works best when the case file is on something you can get back into: your own practice's project, a building you work in, or one your community cares about.

Taking more than one

AT6031 is one of three Level 9 micro-credentials CCAE offers this year, and the three share a method while dividing the work. AT6012 Design Research: Technology Transformations holds the big picture and the seeing: framing, mapping, atlassing. It started on 23 September 2026. AT6020 Research Methods II: Digital Storytelling and Immersive Fictions teaches how to tell these stories digitally, and commenced on 23 October 2026. AT6031 holds the specific instruments, the ones you put on one building.

The three were timetabled to sit beside each other and the Wednesday lunchtime hour is shared between them, so a learner on one can sit in on the others' guests. The full CCAE micro-credentials schedule shows how they run together across the year.

Dates, fee, entry requirements, learning outcomes, module goal, module content and assessment on this page are read from the UCC module descriptor at ucc.ie/en/at6031, updated 7 August 2026 and re-read 1 September 2026, and cross-checked against the RIAI CPD course description of 1 September 2026 and the CCAE delivery schedule. The 2024 CPD dates and the Building Change CPD sequence are read from the event record for the first offering. Page written 1 September 2026. Cork Centre for Architectural Education, UCC and MTU. Part of the CCAE Building Change project. Licensed CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.