THE ANTONINUS JOURNAL

Abstract

Liberty Bakery is one of the oldest bakeries in Tondo, Manila and serves as a community asset because of its status as a heritage bakery. Its building has been adaptively reused and is currently undergoing conservation and the construction of an in-house café. To observe proper implementation of adaptive reuse, the process flow for heritage spaces under the Socio-Cultural Sustainability Index (Venturina-Bulanadi, 2020) was followed. It is important to ensure that proper procedures of adaptive reuse are implemented to avoid any negative impacts. In the author’s previous study for the Index, she pointed out that adaptive reuse projects that are not planned, developed, and executed properly may negatively affect the structure itself and its community. This results in disharmony and disconnection between the heritage structure and the community or context where it stands. Therefore, it is important to use standard adaptive reuse procedures, such as the Socio-Cultural Sustainability Index (SCSI) developed by the author. This paper aims to document the implementation of the Index into the adaptive reuse of Liberty’s historic residential structure into a bakery and café. Its research method is based primarily on action research wherein it simultaneously demonstrates the utilization of the Index into a heritage structure while establishing any observable facts on its usage. The study found that the application of the Socio-Cultural Sustainability Index can be successfully implemented to the adaptive reuse of a historic residential building into a bakery and café, with minor adjustments on the process flow to accommodate the unique characteristics of a bakery function, such as the project sustainability assessment and the need to effectively manage intergenerational homeowners participating in the project.