When Buildings Become Monsters: A New Framework Reads Adaptive Reuse Through Vitruvius

When a gleaming glass extension erupts from a century-old museum, or a faceted volume hovers above a brick fire station, critics sometimes reach for a pointed label: Frankenstein architecture. The phrase, borrowed from Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel and its more familiar film descendants, describes buildings perceived as fragmented, incoherent assemblages lacking cultural authenticity. Now a study published in the journal City, Territory and Architecture has turned that evocative insult into a working analytical tool, arguing that the metaphor can be systematically operationalised to explain why some interventions between old and new fabric are received as monstrous while others are embraced.

The research, authored by Rasha Fahim Elgazzar and Gihan Mossad Hannalla, develops what the authors call the Frankenstein–Vitruvian interpretive framework. It is not a measuring instrument and makes no claim to be one. Instead, it arranges the Frankenstein metaphor within a four-dimensional structure derived from Vitruvius’s first-century BCE triad — firmitas (structural soundness), utilitas (functionality) and venustas (beauty) — extended with a fourth virtue, dignitas, meaning respect for heritage values, as proposed for adaptive reuse contexts by Clarke and Kuipers in 2023. The authors are careful to stress that dignitas is Clarke and Kuipers’ own proposal rather than a settled addition to architectural theory, and that the framework’s constituent metaphors — parasite and prosthetic, symbiosis, palimpsest, translation, duet — were already in circulation. The claimed contribution is a re-configuration of existing concepts into a usable interpretive lens, not the invention of new ones.

The authors justify the unlikely pairing of Shelley with Vitruvius through three arguments. Both, they contend, are theories of well-formed making: Vitruvius asks what makes a built thing sound, useful and beautiful, while Shelley’s novel meditates on what happens when a creator privileges the act of animation over the viability and integration of the thing created. The correspondences are argued term by term. The assembled, load-bearing body maps onto firmitas; the spark of animation that makes the creature act maps onto utilitas; the visible stitches and seams at which the assembly is read map onto venustas; and dignitas supplies the ethical dimension Shelley foregrounds, the creature’s tragedy of abandonment mirroring heritage fabric treated as mere substrate rather than an entity owed respect.

The framework also draws deliberately on monster theory. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s influential theses establish that the monster embodies category crisis, resisting taxonomic placement, and that judgements of monstrosity are situated and revisable rather than absolute. Marco Frascari’s Monsters of Architecture supplies an etymological argument: the Latin monstrum is linked to monere, to warn, and the architectural monster is a demonstrative body that instructs by deviation. On this reading, monstrosity can be an achievement as readily as a fault, and the framework is designed to describe an architect’s intended confrontational seam rather than penalise it. The study also notes that the popular image of a body crudely stitched and bolted together owes more to twentieth-century film than to Shelley’s text, in which the creature is a gigantic but coherent being.

To demonstrate the framework, the authors read three high-profile cases along a continuum from parasitic through commensal to mutualistic association, using the symbiosis classification of Šijaković and Perić. The Royal Ontario Museum Crystal in Toronto, Daniel Libeskind’s 2007 addition of five interlocking angular prisms clad in brushed aluminium and glass, reads as tending toward the parasitic end. According to published accounts, the prismatic volumes are largely structurally independent of the 1914 Neo-Romanesque host, connected principally via bridges, and this separation has been associated with reported leaks at the complex glazing joints and heavy internal bracing requirements. Functional difficulties are widely documented: slanted walls complicate object display, the non-orthogonal geometry has been reported to disorient visitors, and the signature Spirit House staircase proved problematic enough that a renovation is reconfiguring the entrance sequence. The project also required the demolition of the museum’s 1982 Terrace Galleries, which were not heritage-designated.

The Port House in Antwerp, Zaha Hadid Architects’ 2016 conversion of a derelict 1922 fire station into the port authority headquarters, occupies a middle, broadly commensal position. The faceted glass-and-aluminium addition appears to float above the brick base on two sculptural concrete supports, and published accounts describe the new volume as structurally interdependent with the base, with load transferred through reinforced foundations and the diamond form wind-tunnel tested. The building consolidates roughly 500 employees previously scattered across the city, and the addition fulfilled the competition brief’s requirement to preserve the historic facades. Reception was genuinely mixed: the Architects’ Journal’s Felix Mara questioned whether the headquarters seemed aggressive toward its host, while others praised that dynamism, and the framework records this as a contested aesthetic reading rather than a settled value.

The Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, Herzog & de Meuron’s 2017 concert hall placed atop the gutted 1963 Kaispeicher A warehouse, reads as tending toward mutualistic integration. The warehouse shell was preserved as foundation and facade, with the new structure supported by approximately 1,700 piles, creating a shared structural system in which the historic warehouse enables the concert hall and the concert hall justifies the warehouse’s preservation. Despite cost overruns that brought the final figure to roughly €866 million against an early estimate of €77 million, public reception shifted from hostility to wide acclaim, and the building was named to Time magazine’s World’s 100 Greatest Places in 2018. The authors note that the warehouse was gutted entirely, so the dignitas reading is left genuinely debatable rather than resolved.

The comparative reading supports the study’s central proposition: perceived architectural monstrosity tends to follow not from stylistic contrast alone but from compounded weaknesses across structural integration, functional coherence, aesthetic synthesis and heritage sensitivity. The Elbphilharmonie juxtaposes industrial brick with crystalline glass as dramatically as the Crystal juxtaposes Neo-Romanesque stone with deconstructivist aluminium, yet the difference lies in execution across the four dimensions. The authors also caution that reception is contingent: the Elbphilharmonie’s reversal was bound up with cost overruns, political controversy and delayed completion, contingencies no reading of the four dimensions could have predicted, which is why the framework’s readings are explicitly time-indexed and revisable.

The authors are unusually candid about the limits of their evidence. The analysis is discursive rather than experiential: it documents how buildings are written about, received and contested in published criticism, media coverage and designer narratives, not how they are actually experienced by users. None of the case readings analyses a plan, section or elevation at first hand; even the technical readings rest on published documentation rather than first-hand structural analysis. The three cases were purposively selected — all high-profile, well-documented works by celebrated architects — making the sample partly confirmatory by design, and the framework has not been tested on cases that might resist it. No inter-rater testing has been conducted, and the cases are drawn from Western contexts at the upper tier of architectural production.

Positioned as a candidate reading aid rather than a validated diagnostic instrument, the framework’s practical use is a set of questions for self-interrogation: to what degree has a design attended to structural integration, functional coherence, aesthetic synthesis and heritage sensitivity, and where a seam is left visible, is that intention or fault? The authors propose grounding the technical readings in annotated drawings, testing the framework through post-occupancy evaluation and user-experience studies, and applying it to non-Western, vernacular and informal transformations. Architects, they suggest, need not avoid bold gestures for fear of producing Frankenstein architecture; the goal is not stylistic conservatism but careful attention to the quality of the stitches that bind past and present into legible, liveable wholes.

Subject of Research: An interpretive framework using the Frankenstein metaphor and Vitruvian virtues to analyse adaptive reuse architecture

Article Title: Frankenstein architecture: an interpretive framework for reading adaptive reuse through the Vitruvian lens

Article References: Elgazzar, R. F., & Hannalla, G. M. (2026). Frankenstein architecture: an interpretive framework for reading adaptive reuse through the Vitruvian lens. City, Territory and Architecture, 13(1), Article 26. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40410-026-00328-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40410-026-00328-5

Keywords: adaptive reuse, architectural heritage, Frankenstein metaphor, Vitruvian triad, dignitas, Royal Ontario Museum, Port House Antwerp, Elbphilharmonie, monster theory, interpretive framework, heritage sensitivity, architectural criticism