The Hidden Heritage, St. Catherine Cathedral Rediscovering the Old City

Abstract

In a city that was built on a dream, the idea of having all knowledge stored in one place and a gate to join both sides of the world east and west. For that reason we must not bury the memory of Alexandria but celebrate it.

• Adaptive reuse of monuments \restoring religious buildings with different uses”.
• The most important problem today is how to protect the historical heritage.

It is necessary to provide contemporary uses for protecting the historical heritage and transfer this attitude and new life to these buildings in order to carry them to the future generations.

The method required for this attempt is adapting these old buildings with new uses which is called as adaptive re-use.

The target of this project is adaptive re-use methods and challenges or benefits of a building that has special significance.

When restoration of religious buildings come into practice, this case is even harder than restoring any kind of monumental buildings, when faced with adaptive re-use examples of religious buildings, this kind of function variations in order to protect the meant values, the researches to be made and the ways to be followed can be described in a systematically manner as:

• Re-functioning process.
• Adaptation of the new function to the old building.
• Design concept in the revalorization.

In this study the cases of adaptive re-use examples of religious buildings with many implementations different places of the Europe and how the architectural design concept is implemented in these building.