The architects formulated the idea for their patchwork facade in the context of an architectural competition for the extension building in 2005. Their inspiration, according to Samyn, came from a chance encounter in close proximity to his own home. A local resident was in the process of discarding beautiful old oak windows into a rubbish skip, as they were no longer needed after an energy refurbishment had been undertaken on his building.
Between prestige and provocation
The symbolic value of the EU Council of Ministers is not to be underestimated. It is the most prominent exponent of a continuously growing number of new buildings in which recycled materials of all kinds play a major role. Its aesthetics range from comparatively conventional architecture, as in the case of Villa Welpeloo in Enschede by 2012Architecten (today, Superuse Studios; see DETAIL 12/2010, p. 1314f.) to built schemes such as Waste House on the campus of the University of Brighton, which was inaugurated in mid-2014. The building is intended to serve as a venue for events hosted by the Faculty of Arts. It was designed and built by nearly three hundred university students and apprentice carpenters under the leadership of the architect Duncan Baker-Brown. Ninety per cent of the building is made of household and construction waste; some of it sourced from unusual places. Nevertheless it has the best energy rating ‘A+’ under the British Energy Performance Certificate system. The building envelope is particularly interesting. Behind the outer cladding, consisting of 2,000 carpet tiles with their underside facing outwards, there is a wooden frame construction, the hollow spaces of which are filled with almost everything that the British waste industry had to offer: video cassettes and DVD cases, unused discarded rolls of carpet, as well as 20,000 disposable toothbrushes that passengers had left in airplanes after long-haul flights. Old bicycle inner tubes are used as window sealing and plastic sheeting made of car tyres that had been thrown away has been used to seal the roof.
From the point of view of Duncan Baker-Brown, the house is not so much a model for future new buildings as a built provocation aimed at bringing the attention of the public to an often overlooked issue: The wasteful way in which the construction industry handles resources. “For every five houses we build in the UK, the equivalent of one house in waste materials gets put into landfill,” maintained Baker-Brown. According to the architect, a large portion of the construction material that is discarded is still perfectly usable.
The advantages of directly re-using rather than recycling waste are evident: If waste materials do not have to be shredded or chemically broken down into their original substances, large amounts of energy can be saved. Jan Jongert from Superuse Studios calculated this using the example of the Villa Welpeloo. Its load-bearing structure made of reused steel girders only contains around an eighth of the embodied energy of a skeleton made of new girders – even if 90 per cent of the latter is made from recycled steel.
In order to connect suppliers and buyers of waste materials that are suitable for building, Superuse Studios have set up a website (www.harvestmap.org). By itself, however, trading does not work very well, said Jongert: “Most manufacturers and demolition companies are simply not geared up to bother about reusing their waste sensibly. They also have no financial incentive to do so.” Middlemen who specialise in sourcing suitable waste materials on behalf of planners and clients are therefore essential, according to Jongert. A lot of what is offered on harvestmap.org originates from such intermediaries.
Building with waste materials requires that old planning habits be broken. “It’s a process of designing where you have to be agile, and maybe change your plans according to what becomes available,” maintains Duncan Baker-Brown. What is important here, said Jongert, is the scale of a project: “In the case of small, temporary structures, the design often depends on the materials that are available. Larger buildings involve a parallel, iterative process of designing and finding materials. This also means that more work goes into the early phases of planning because functional requirements and the availability of construction materials have to be reconciled with each other from the very beginning.
A characteristic of numerous buildings made of recycled materials is the use of oversized building elements. “When you don’t know the provenance of the material, calculations have to be based on the worst-case scenario,” said Duncan Baker-Brown. Moreover, cutting waste materials exactly to the necessary minimum size involves extra work, which tends to drive construction costs up. In general, the amount of working time required plays a decisive role in costing. First of all, building with reused materials requires a great deal of planning. Secondly, demolition companies have to be more careful than usual if the materials are to be used again to good purpose later on. Duncan Baker-Brown sees the high costs of labour as one of the main reasons why materials are so frequently squandered: “The current ethos in the industry is to throw loads of material at the building site, rather than risk having people hanging around if anything runs out. There has to be a way of storing and reusing all the surplus, rather than throwing it in landfill.
And yet the wastage of materials on building sites can easily be avoided, as some pilot projects show. One example was the general refurbishment of the twin towers of Deutsche Bank in Frankfurt in 2008, where almost 80 % of the demolition material was re-used or recycled. According to Martin Roiner, environmental officer at Lindner, the company responsible for interior construction and waste management of the project, a high recycling ratio also makes financial sense. Building waste that is sorted into different types of substances – a prerequisite for any form of recycling – usually entails lower disposal costs. In the case of metals, it is even a potential source of income. The recycling concept for the Deutsche Bank towers necessitated close cooperation with local disposal companies as well as careful planning and supervision of the demolition work. In this way, more than 29,000 tonnes of demolition material were saved from being dumped into landfills. Furthermore, parts of the still fairly new interior – including partition walls, furnishings and raised access floors – were reused directly in other buildings.
Barriers to the conservation of resources
Together with his architects’ office Encore Heureux, Nicola Delon curated the Matière Grise exhibition in the Paris Pavillon de l’Arsenal, in which 75 examples of contemporary recycling architecture were presented last autumn. In his opinion, recycling will play an increasingly greater role in construction in the future: “The reason for this is simple: resources as well as waste materials are becoming scarcer and scarcer.” In order to achieve a higher rate of re-use, better knowledge of the existing building stock would be necessary, according to Delon. “In France, we have no idea what materials are used in buildings, where they are used and what the amounts and quality of such materials are.” Internet platforms for used building materials in the country do not even yet exist.
In the view of Martin Roiner, there must be changes – above all in the way building specialists are trained: “We must anchor knowledge of waste management and material flows much more strongly in the syllabuses of faculties of structural engineering and architecture. It would also be helpful if preference were to be given to recycled building materials when public invitations to tender are announced.
For Jan Jongert, the barriers are primarily economic: “In our society, resources are too cheap and labour is too expensive. And this mainly has to do with the level of taxation.” If the high-value, but work-intensive reuse of building materials is to become widespread, taxes on natural resources must be increased while, conversely, social-security and pension contributions must be lowered. Otherwise, buildings such as those of Superuse Studios or Philippe Samyn will continue to be a rare exception.
