Traditional building technologies tend towards a closer relationship of the built environment to an in-practice understanding, interaction and use of natural resources and recycled or salvaged building materials than is common in the practice of modern and contemporary building technologies.
For example: a traditional timber framer in search of difficult-to-acquire materials with which to rebuild heritage structures will tend to seek out an understanding of forest management, tree harvest, conversion process and building design and technique. These integrated skills and their supportive knowledge base both in scale and localization are readily adaptable to strategies of sustainable new-build economies.
Old buildings and structures were built once, energy and natural resources previously expended, and to adaptively re-use or recycle them often requires an understanding and appreciation of not only how the older materials with which they were built work together in a structure, but a need to understand the techniques by which these materials were originally worked, and an understanding of how they can most optimally be worked now.